THEY CHANGED THE WORLD BY WRITING
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“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
For Christians, that opening passage from the Gospel of John is foundational to their faith. For others, it reflects humankind’s reliance on language to comprehend, as best we can, that which is beyond language.
In the twentieth century the power of language to influence acquired extraordinary reach, spurred by previously unimaginable advances in literacy, leisure time, and technology. Suddenly ordinary men and women had access to information and inspiration previously restricted to the elite or the nearby. The impact was nothing short of a revolution in the dissemination of ideas that undoubtedly would leave Johannes Gutenberg flabbergasted. For communicators, the changes presented vast opportunities, larger and broader potential audiences, and problems, the Babel of competing and contradictory voices. The individuals profiled here managed to remain rooted in ageless spiritual soil while navigating these unprecedented challenges.
Thomas Berry’s concerns reflect the downside of the century’s “advances”—the degradation of God’s natural world and faith in material progress above all else. A Roman Catholic priest, Berry has pushed his tradition, and other traditions, to redefine the human penchant for creating environmental havoc as a sign of spiritual blindness toward our place in the cosmos. Martin Buber also wrote of the need for a spiritual link between humankind and God as he strove for a reversal of the widespread alienation endemic to the century. Buber lived and worked within a Jewish context, often using traditional Hasidic tales to make his points. Yet the influence of his writing went far beyond the parameters of his religious community. His philosophical signature, what he termed the I-Thou relationship, entered the universal spiritual lexicon.
After Joseph Campbell’s death, a six-part television series in 1988 propelled his ideas into the popular consciousness with a swiftness impossible in any previous century. Through television’s visual text, Campbell’s pioneering exploration of how the building blocks of mythology transcend cultural differences was introduced to vast audiences. Mythology’s psychological insights and their relevance to modern society were made clear by the new literary form. Huston Smith, a thoroughly modern spiritual explorer who embraced firsthand the extraordinary range of religious experience he studied, also mastered the age’s distinct mode of communication to the benefit of his audiences.
Mircea Eliade was another of the century’s seminal scholars in the history of religion. But unlike that of Campbell and Smith, Eliade’s writing remained largely confined to academic circles and students of the development of mystical traditions. Together, the three underscore how important personality and showmanship became to the dissemination of ideas in the latter half of the twentieth century.
C. S. Lewis and D. T. Suzuki represent spiritual writing of an earlier yet modern time. The contemplative reality—not reality programming—was their sphere. Yet both men, from very different backgrounds and perspectives, also benefited from the century’s emphasis on mass marketing and popular culture. Lewis, among the best-selling authors of all time, was the subject of an acclaimed movie about—how twentieth-century!—his love life. His Chronicles of Narnia gave him posthumous celebrity status among children beguiled by his wistful imagination, just as adults are won by his deeply Christian sensibilities. Suzuki, meanwhile, was embraced by leading Beat Generation Buddhists—the century’s literary equivalent of the Transcendentalists—making him a popular public figure in his own right.
Abraham Isaac Kook and Simone Weil were as much participants in the history of the century as they were chroniclers of the period’s inner life. Both sprang from Jewish roots, but they traveled very different paths. Kook cast his lot with Jewish nationalism, seeing in it a manifestation of biblical prophecy. Though intensely involved with worldly pursuits, he wrote widely on spiritual and philosophical themes in a variety of literary forms. Weil, in contrast, published little during her lifetime, which was defined, tragically, by the century’s two world wars. Moreover, she embraced Christian faith even as she stayed apart from the official church.
In that, she represented much of the century’s spiritual zeitgeist—a soul buffeted by horrendous human pain, searching wherever the path might take her for a spiritual language that approximated her inner longing and realizations.
(1914–)
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Considered one of the elders of the environmental movement, Thomas Berry was initially a cultural historian of Europe and Asia, who became a historian of the earth. He considers himself a “geologian,” a term that encompasses his role as a cosmological historian and his attention to the new planetary civilization. One of his primary concerns is that society and educational institutions foster an appreciation of the world rather than continue a human-centered cultural consciousness that exploits the earth for its own purposes.
Berry was born in the hill country of North Carolina and ordained a Roman Catholic priest. He received his Ph.D. from the Catholic University of America in European intellectual history and directed the Riverdale Center for Religious Research in New York City while teaching at Fordham University.
Berry has observed that each age has its “great work.” The classical period produced reason and democracy; the medieval period gave us glorious cathedrals; and the age of discovery opened lines of transportation and communication. Berry argues that modern society’s “great work” is to connect technological advances to environmental concerns. He proposes that we are entering the “Ecozoic Age,” an era when humanity must work to reconnect to the earth and create a way of life that reverses the destruction it has inflicted on the planet. He believes that we should extend legal rights to “other than human” interests and that corporations should be limited by law to morally accountable activities.
Through his books and lectures, Berry has urged us to change nothing less than our cosmology—for the sake of the future of the earth.
In The Universe Story, Berry and his coauthor, Brian Swimme, developed the idea that science is now telling us a “new story,” which began with the “Great Unfolding,” their term for the big bang. Humans, says Berry, need to rediscover their place in an evolving cosmos and their creative role in the changing world.
HIS WORDS
We need to move from our human-centered to an earth-centered norm of reality and value. Only in this way can we fulfill our human role within the functioning of the planet we live on. Earth, within the solar system, is the immediate context of our existence. Beyond the sun is our own galaxy and beyond that the universe of galactic systems that emerged into being some fifteen billion years ago through some originating source beyond human comprehension.
Establishing this comprehensive context of our thinking is important in any consideration of human affairs, for only in this way can we identify any satisfying referent in our quest for a viable presence of the human within the larger dynamics of the universe. The universe itself is the enduring reality and the enduring value even while it finds expression in a continuing sequence of transformations.
—The Great Work, pp. 56–57
Books by Thomas Berry
The Dream of the Earth. San Francisco, Calif.: Sierra Club Books, 1990.
The Great Work: Our Way into the Future. New York: Bell Tower, 2000.
The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era—A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos. With Brian Swimme. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994.
Book about Thomas Berry
Lonergan, Anne, and Caroline Richards, eds. Thomas Berry and the New Cosmology. Mystic, Conn.: Twenty-third Publications, 1987.
Web site: www.ecoethics.net. Harvard Divinity School’s Environmental Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Event: Annual Colloquium with Thomas Berry. Each year Berry and a speaker from another discipline discuss a particular aspect of the human-earth relationship. Web site: www.web.net/~eaite/programm.htm.
Videotapes: Thomas Berry: Dreamer of the Universe, First Run Features, 1994; A Tribute to Fr. Thomas Berry, Passionist Community of Canada; The Universe Story, Centre for Ecology and Theology.
Audiotape: The Collected Thoughts of Thomas Berry, Center for the Story of the Universe.
“The universe itself is the enduring reality and the enduring value even while it finds expression in a continuing sequence of transformations.”
(1878–1965)
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Among the foremost twentiethcentury philosophers of human relations and Jewish thought, Martin Buber is best known for expounding on the need to be in dialogue with other humans and with God on the basis of an “I-Thou,” as opposed to an “I-It,” relationship. His work on Hasidic thought (Tales of the Hasidim), Zionism, and religious philosophy continues to influence both the academic study of Judaism and religious thinking more broadly. He also inspired the trend toward neo-Hasidism among modern Jews.
Buber was born to assimilated Jews; his mother left the family when he was three, and he was raised in what is today Ukraine by his maternal grandparents, who were immersed in Jewish culture and Jewish enlightenment movements. At university he studied art and philosophy, and his doctoral dissertation at the University of Vienna dealt with mysticism. At that time he also became influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s attack on modern culture, which led Buber to advocate for Zionism as a means of returning to a people’s roots and a more wholesome culture.
Buber served as editor of the Zionist magazine Die Welt (The World) at the invitation of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. But the two soon broke over disagreements about priorities and beliefs: Buber saw Zionism primarily as a means of Jewish cultural and social renewal, and disagreed with Herzl’s single-minded emphasis on the goal of attaining land in Palestine for Jews. In 1916 Buber created a monthly called Der Jude (The Jew), which rose to prominence in the Germanspeaking Jewish world, and he used the forum to advocate for Jewish-Arab cooperation and a binational state in Palestine.
I-Thou relationships between humans are those that treat the other as an equal and autonomous being, Buber wrote, and represent the pinnacle of human relationships.
In the early part of the twentieth century, Buber also took up the study of Hasidism, in which he saw answers for Judaism’s spiritual decline and the alienation endemic to the times. In Hasidism he saw the achievement of three vital relationships: between human and God, human and human, and human and nature. His retelling of Hasidic tales remains popular, along with his scholarly works on the topic.
His seminal work, I and Thou, was published in 1923. Although I-Thou relationships—those that treat the other as an equal and autonomous being—are rare and difficult, he wrote, they represent the pinnacle of human relationships. More often, humans interact with each other in an I-It relation, treating the other as an object, a means to an end. When it comes to God, I-Thou relations are essential. God, he wrote, can be known through the revelation of everyday existence, and the Bible itself is a record of this human experience of and dialogue with God.
From 1924 to 1933 Buber lectured at the University of Frankfurt, where he was influenced by the great Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, with whom he collaborated on a German translation of the Hebrew Bible. At age sixty, after the Nazis forbade him from public lecturing, Buber immigrated to Palestine. He taught at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and worked tirelessly until his death in 1965 for Arab-Jewish understanding.
HIS WORDS
A time of genuine religious conversations is beginning—not those so-called but fictitious conversations where none regarded and addressed his partner in reality, but genuine dialogues, speech from certainty to certainty, but also from one open-hearted person to another openhearted person. Only then will genuine common life appear, not that of an identical content of faith which is alleged to be found in all religions, but that of the situation, of anguish and expectations.
—Between Man and Man, pp. 7–8
To Hasidism, the true meaning of life is revealed in the deed. Here, even more distinctly and profoundly than in early Christianity, what matters is not what is being done, but the fact that every act carried out in sanctity—that is, with God-oriented intent—is a road to the heart of the world. There is nothing that is evil in itself; every passion can become a virtue, every inclination a “vehicle of God.”
—On Judaism, p. 48
Books by Martin Buber
Between Man and Man. New York: Collier Books, 1965.
I and Thou. Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. 1923. Reprint, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2000.
The Letters of Martin Buber: A Life of Dialogue. Edited by Nahum N. Glatzer. Translated by Paul Mendes-Flohr. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996.
On Judaism. New York, Schocken Books, 1967.
The Tales of Rabbi Nachman. Introductions by Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Ze’ev Gries. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1999.
Tales of the Hasidim. New York: Schocken Books, 1991.
Books about Martin Buber
Herman, Jonathan R. I and Tao: Martin Buber’s Encounter with Chuang Tzu. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.
Hodes, Aubrey. Martin Buber: An Intimate Portrait. New York: Viking Press, 1971.
Moore, Donald J. Martin Buber: Prophet of Religious Secularism. New York: Fordham University Press, 1996.
For a more complete list of books by and about Martin Buber, see Hodes, Martin Buber, pp. 235–237.
Other Resources
Web site: www.buber.de. Martin Buber home page.
Artwork: William Kallfelz, 1992 painting, Martin Buber—“I And Thou.”
Andy Warhol, 1980 screenprint, part of the Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century Suite.
“The close association of the relation to God with the relation to one’s fellow-men … is my most essential concern.”
(1904–1987)
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Joseph Campbell was an American scholar and author who became internationally known for his work in comparative mythology. With his masterful storytelling ability, he made the study of myths enjoyable and meaningful to a broad audience. His books explored connections between the myths of different cultures, psychological insights into mythology, and the relevance of ancient myths to modern life.
Campbell was born in New York City, where as a youth he became interested in myths, especially those of American Indians. He acquired a master’s degree in medieval literature from Columbia University in 1926 and continued his studies at universities in Paris and Munich over the next few years. During this period he became acquainted with the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, whose psychological theories influenced the development of his thoughts on mythology.
In 1934 Campbell joined the literature department at Sarah Lawrence College, where he taught for thirty-eight years. He secured his place as the leading mythologist of his time with the publication of his first book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in 1949. In it he described an archetypal hero that occurred in the myths of many of the world’s cultures.
Campbell’s expression “Follow your bliss” became a popular reminder that happiness results when we listen to our deepest intuitions and pursue our most passionate interests.
Over the years, in addition to his writing, Campbell did important work as an editor, assisting Swami Nikhilananda in translating The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna and the Upanishads; editing works on the art, myths, and philosophy of India by the German Indologist Heinrich Zimmerman; compiling the anthology The Portable Jung; and editing papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, which published important writings on symbology and other subjects related to Jungian psychology.
In 1988, a year after his death, Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, a six-part television series of interviews with Bill Moyers, introduced Campbell’s ideas and work to millions of viewers. His expression “Follow your bliss” became a popular reminder that happiness results when we listen to our deepest intuitions and pursue our most passionate interests.
HIS WORDS
It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.
—The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 3
In France, they name streets after their poets; we have them named after generals. When you think of Melville, Mark Twain, and Emerson, and you go to the places where those men lived, there’s no recognition of their having been there; names of former mayors are on five or six different street corners, but not the poets and the artists.
—An Open Life, p. 102
Books by Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 1949. Reprint, New York: Fine Creative Media, 1996.
A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living. Edited by Diane K. Osborn. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.
The Masks of God. 4 vols. Vol. 1: Primitive Mythology (1991). Vol. 2: Oriental Mythology (1995). Vol. 3: Occidental Mythology (1995). Vol. 4: Creative Mythology (1995). New York: Arkana.
Myths to Live By. New York: Arkana, 1993.
An Open Life: Joseph Campbell in Conversation with Michael Toms. New York: Harper & Row, 1990.
The Power of Myth. New York: Anchor Books, 1991.
Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor. Edited by Eugene C. Kennedy. San Rafael, Calif.: New World Library, 2001.
Books about Joseph Campbell
Ellwood, Robert S. The Politics of Myth: A Study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1999.
Larson, Stephen. A Fire in the Mind: The Life of Joseph Campbell. New York: Anchor Books, 1993.
Noel, Daniel C., ed. Paths to the Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell and the Study of Religion. New York: Crossroad, Herder & Herder, 1994.
Organization
Joseph Campbell Foundation, P.O. Box 36, San Anselmo, CA 94979-0413; phone: 800-330-6984; e-mail: info@jcf.org; web site: www.jcf.org.
Other Resources
Videotapes/DVDs: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, PBS-TV; Joseph Campbell: The Hero’s Journey; Mythos I and Mythos II; all available from Mystic Fire Video.
Audiotapes: Joseph Campbell Audio Collection: vol. 1, Mythology and the Individual, HighBridge Audio; Myth and Metaphor in Society, Joseph Campbell talks with Jamake Highwater, Mystic Fire Audio.
“Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.”
(1907–1986)
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One of the twentieth century’s preeminent religious scholars, Mircea Eliade was a pioneer in the systematic study of the history of religion and a seminal influence on a generation of scholars in the field. His work in comparative religion influenced an entire generation of scholars, including Wendy Doniger and Lawrence E. Sullivan.
Born in Romania, Eliade received his M.A. in philosophy from the University of Bucharest in 1928. He then studied Sanskrit and Indian philosophy at the University of Calcutta and lived for six months in an Indian ashram. During his time in India he began to develop his views on the meaning of language, symbolism, and systems employed by the various religious traditions. It was his aim to resolve and incorporate this view of meaning and symbolism within underlying primordial myths that provide the basis for mystical phenomena. He coined the word hierophanies to mean manifestations of the sacred world, applying the term to all religious experience in traditional and contemporary societies.
In 1931 Eliade returned to Romania and completed his Ph.D. with a dissertation on yoga and its relationship to Indian mysticism, after which he taught the history of religions and Indian philosophy at the University of Bucharest. He spent World War II in England and Portugal, moving to Paris and the Sorbonne after the war, when the political situation made it impossible for him to return to Romania. In 1956 he became professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, where he remained for the rest of his career.
Eliade coined the word hierophanies to mean manifestations of the sacred world, applying the term to all religious experience in traditional and contemporary societies.
Eliade’s interpretation of traditional religious cultures and his analysis of the forms of mystical experience found in them was the primary subject of his major works. He was editor in chief of the University of Chicago’s monumental sixteen-volume Encyclopedia of Religion.
HIS WORDS
All of the culture of the traditional person, translated into everyday rites and daily symbols, is but a continuous memorial, in gesture and mind, of the invisible plane, of the sacrality of the world, and a constant offering of thanks and reverence to the deity, to the numina (spirit, or creative energy) that are perpetually generating us.
—The Sacred and the Profane, chapter 4
I wanted to engineer a confrontation between two mythologies: the mythology of folklore, of the people, which is still alive, still welling up in the old man, and the mythology of the modern world, of technocracy.… These two mythologies meet head on.
—Ordeal by Labyrinth, p. 182
Books by Mircea Eliade
The Myth of the Eternal Return. Translated by Willard Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.
Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude-Henri Rocquet.
Translated by Derek Coltman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. (Bibliography of works by and about Eliade, pp. 213–225.)
The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Translated by Willard Trask. Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 1972.
Shamanism. Translated by Willard Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.
Yoga: Immortality and Freedom. Translated by Willard Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.
“All of the culture of the traditional person, translated into everyday rites and daily symbols, is but a continuous memorial, in gesture and mind, … of the sacrality of the world.”
Books about Mircea Eliade
Olson, Carl. The Theology and Philosophy of Eliade. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.
Rennie, Bryan. Reconstructing Eliade: Making Sense of Religion. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.
(1865–1935)
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Both a mystic and a master of Talmudic law, a visionary and a realist, Abraham Isaac Kook played an influential role in the rebirth of Jewish life in Israel and was influential in gaining Orthodox backing for the new state through his support of the movement known as religious Zionism. He served as the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Palestine, before modern Israel was founded. (Ashkenazi Jews are those with roots in northern and eastern Europe.)
Avraham Yitzhak ha-Cohen Kook (his full Hebrew name, affectionately shortened to Rav Kook) was born in Greiva, Latvia, and received his rabbinical training at the renowned Talmudic Academy in Volozhin, Lithuania. In 1904 he immigrated to Palestine, where he was named chief rabbi of Jaffa. At the outbreak of World War I, Kook was stranded in Europe, where he had gone to attend a religious convention. Upon his return to Palestine in 1919, he became chief rabbi of Jerusalem and, in 1921, chief rabbi of the entire Jewish community of Palestine.
Kook produced numerous works on a wide variety of subjects, including philosophical essays, spiritual meditations, and poetry. His most important work is the Orot ha-Kodesh (Lights of Holiness), written in the form of a spiritual diary. Among his interests were social issues, the place of religion in the modern world, and the quest for unity and harmony among all peoples. He loved the land of Israel and the Jewish people, believing that nationalism was a necessary step toward achieving the ideal of universalism in the world. Although his universal views attracted criticism and controversy, he was loved and revered by secular kibbutz farmers and deeply religious Talmudic scholars alike.
Kook taught that Jews were obligated to play an active role in their destiny rather than rely on God alone.
As a traditional Orthodox Jew, Kook was unusual in his openness to new ideas. He supported Zionism despite the antireligious stance of the early pioneers, because he saw Jewish settlement of the Holy Land as the beginning of the divine redemption foretold by the prophets. He taught that Jews were obligated to play an active role in their destiny rather than rely on God alone. Unlike most Orthodox rabbis of his time, he accepted Jews who did not obey Judaism’s religious laws while seeking to guide them back to traditional observance. Kook did not see a sharp division between the sacred and the “profane”; he therefore advocated the study of secular subjects, such as the sciences and literature, in the yeshivot (Jewish academies). The yeshiva he founded in Jerusalem, Yeshivat Merkaz ha-Rav, remains a major center of Talmudic study today.
HIS WORDS
All the deficiencies in the world, both the physical and the spiritual, derive from the fact that every individual comprehends only one aspect of existence which appeals to him, and all other aspects which are outside his comprehension, as far as he is concerned, might as well disappear.… To cope with these deficiencies, of which the whole world suffers, and we especially, is the mission of the zaddikim [the righteous] who, by reason and will, strive for unification. It is their vocation to mend, to integrate, and to extend peace in the world by effecting peace in the inner realm of their own soul, by exemplifying an outlook which is comprehensive and universal, which always releases life and light in all directions.
—Orot ha-Kodesh I, in The Essential Writings of Abraham Isaac Kook, p. 152
Books by Abraham Isaac Kook
Abraham Isaac Kook: The Lights of Penitence, the Moral Principles, Lights of Holiness, Essays, Letters, and Poems. Translated and edited by Ben Zion Bokser. New York: Paulist Press, 1978.
The Art of T’Shuva: Orot HaT’Shuva. Edited by David Samson and Tzvi Fishman. Jerusalem: Beit Orot, 1999.
The Essential Writings of Abraham Isaac Kook. Edited by Ben Zion Bokser. Warwick, N.Y.: Amity House, 1988.
In the Desert—a Vision: Midbar Shur on the Torah Portion of the Week. Translated by Bezalel Naor. Spring Valley, N.Y.: Orot, 2001.
Of Societies Perfect and Imperfect: Selected Readings from Eyn Ayah, Rav Kook’s Commentary to Eyn Yaakov Legends of the Talmud. Translated and annotated with an introduction by Bezalel Naor. Brooklyn: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1995.
Orot: The Annotated Translation of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook’s Seminal Work. Translated by Bezalel Naor. Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1993.
The Teachings of HaRav Avraham Yitzhak Kook. Edited by David Samson and Tzvi Fishman. Jerusalem: Torat Eretz Yisrael Publications, 1996.
Books about Abraham Isaac Kook
Bokser, Ben Zion. Abraham Isaac Kook. Boston: Element Books, 1991.
Cohen, Jack J. Guides for an Age of Confusion: Studies in the Thinking of Avraham Y. Kook and Mordecai M. Kaplan. Bronx, N.Y.: Fordham University Press, 1999.
Elkins, Dov Peretz. Shepherd of Jerusalem: A Biography of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1995.
Organization
Rabbi Kook Foundation (Mosad ha-Rav Kook), Rehov Maimon 1, Kiryat Moshe, Jerusalem; phone: 02-652-6231. A research center and publishing house.
“[The vocation of the righteous is] … to extend peace in the world by effecting peace in the inner realm of their own soul, by exemplifying an outlook which is comprehensive and universal, which always releases life and light in all directions.”
(1898–1963)
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Writing prolifically in four different genres—literary criticism, science fiction, children’s literature, and Christian apologetics—C. S. Lewis was among the twentieth century’s most popular Christian writers and one of the best-selling authors of all time.
Born and raised in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Clive Staples Lewis spent his childhood surrounded by books, ideas, and conversation. Jack, as he preferred to be called, reveled in a fantasy life, drawing pictures of animals imitating human behavior; with his brother, Warren, he invented Animal Land, an imaginary world complete with personified animals, a geography, a history, and a political system. Lewis attended University College, Oxford, and served in the British army during World War I. For twenty-nine years he served as a tutor and popular lecturer in English language and literature at Magdalen College, Oxford. In 1954 he accepted a chair in Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University.
Lewis’s first published works, other than articles in school papers and magazines, are books of poetry, Spirits in Bondage (1919) and Dymer (1926). Receiving little acclaim for his poetry, he began to write prose. In 1933 he wrote his first book on theology, The Pilgrim’s Regress, a story of his reaffirmation of his Christian roots. Although baptized into the Church of England as a child, he had resisted religion in any form until one night in 1929, about which he said in his 1955 autobiography, Surprised by Joy, “In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England; I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms.”
Decades after his death, Lewis’s works of literary criticism, science fiction, children’s literature, and Christian apologetics continue to appeal to children and theologians alike.
Lewis’s influence on the Christian community began in earnest when The Screwtape Letters appeared in a serial in the Guardian newspaper. World fame followed with the publication of the letters as a book in 1941. His contribution to Christian theology and thought grew with a three-year series of broadcasts for the British Broadcasting Company, compiled as Broadcast Talks (1942), The Christian Idea of God (1944), and Mere Christianity (1952). These talks were so popular that Time magazine labeled Lewis an “apostle to the skeptics.” He also wrote the highly acclaimed and vastly popular children’s series The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956). Decades after his death Lewis’s works continue to appeal to children and theologians alike.
HIS WORDS
Morality, then, seems to be concerned with three things. Firstly, with fair play and harmony between individuals. Secondly, with what might be called tidying up or harmonizing the things inside each individual. Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life as a whole: what man was made for: what course the whole fleet ought to be on: what tune the conductor of the band wants it to play.
—Mere Christianity, p. 5
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. … It is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner.… Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses.
—“The Weight of Glory,” in The Essential C. S. Lewis, p. 369
The Complete Chronicles of Narnia. 1950–1956. Reprint, New York: HarperCollins, 1998.
The Essential C. S. Lewis. Edited by Lyle Dorsett. New York: Collier Books, 1988.
A Grief Observed. 1961. Reprint, New York: Bantam Books, 1976.
Mere Christianity. New York: Macmillan, 1943.
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955.
Till We Have Faces. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956.
Books about C. S. Lewis
Carpenter, Humphrey. The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends. London: Allen & Unwin, 1979.
Como, James T., ed. Lewis at the Breakfast Table and Other Reminiscences. New York: Macmillan, 1979.
Gilbert, Douglas, and Clyde S. Kilby. C. S. Lewis: Images of His World. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1973.
Kilby, Clyde S., and Marjorie Lamp Mead, eds. Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis. New York: Harper & Row, 1982.
Payne, Leanne. Real Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Works of C. S. Lewis. Westchester, Ill.: Cornerstone Books, 1979.
Other Resources
Web site: www.cslewis.org. Web site of the C. S. Lewis Foundation.
Videotape: The Chronicles of Narnia, BBC.
Videotape/DVD: Shadowlands, directed by Richard Attenborough, dramatized love story of Lewis and his wife, Joy Davidman Gresham, 1993.
“Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses.”
(1919–)
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A lifelong Christian despite wide religious experimentation, Huston Smith is a pioneer among religion scholars who has popularized the commonalities among what he calls the world’s wisdom traditions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Confucianism, Sikhism, Taoism, Jainism, and Islam—by taking their study out of the classroom and into people’s homes via television and popular books.
Born to Methodist missionaries in China in 1919, Smith came to the United States at age seventeen with the intention of becoming a missionary himself. But after two years in a church pulpit, he returned to school and received a Ph.D. in philosophy of religion at the University of Chicago. In 1955 his undergraduate course on world religions at Washington University in St. Louis was so popular that a local television station asked him to create a series of programs on the subject. When that station evolved into what is now the Public Broadcasting System, it carried Smith’s shows to millions of viewers unfamiliar with non-Christian religions. Smith’s book based on the series, The Religions of Man (later retitled The World’s Religions), sold millions of copies and became a mainstay of living-room coffee tables and college bookshelves.
Smith differs from many religion scholars in his habit of dispensing with the observational study of religions in favor of firsthand experience. He has whirled with Islamic dervishes, practiced yoga with Hindu holy men, meditated with Tibetan Buddhists, ingested peyote with Huichol Indian medicine men, and celebrated the Sabbath with Jewish families. He has consistently sought out the mystical in each religion and has taught that all the world’s major religious traditions are imbued with the Divine and are therefore worthy of study, respect, and understanding.
Smith has consistently taught that all the world’s major religious traditions are imbued with the divine, and are therefore worthy of study, respect, and understanding.
In 1996 Smith was the subject of the five-part Bill Moyers television series The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith. After retiring from his professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, he jumped into the debate between science and religion, calling for recognition of traditional religious wisdom alongside the modern achievements of science. He lives in Berkeley and continues to write and lecture widely.
HIS WORDS
From a purely human standpoint the wisdom traditions are the species’ most prolonged and serious attempts to infer from the maze on this side of the tapestry the pattern which, on its right side, gives meaning to the whole. As the beauty and the harmony of the design derive from the way its parts are related, the design confers on those parts a significance that we, seeing only scraps of the design, do not normally perceive. We could almost say that this belonging to the whole, in something of the way the parts of a painting suggest, is what religion is all about.
—The World’s Religions, p. 387
The community today can be no single tradition; it is the planet. Daily the world grows smaller, leaving understanding the only place where peace can find a home. We are not prepared for the annihilation of distance that science has effected. Who today stands ready to accept the solemn equality of peoples? Who does not have to fight an unconscious tendency to equate foreign with inferior? Some of us have survived this bloodiest of centuries; but if its ordeals are to be birth pangs rather than death throes, the century’s scientific advances must be matched by comparable advances in human relations.
—The World’s Religions, p. 390
Books by Huston Smith
Beyond the Post-Modern Mind. Wheaton, Ill.: Crossroads, 1982.
Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2000.
Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World’s Religions. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992.
Huston Smith: Essays on World Religion. Edited by M. Darrol Bryant. New York: Paragon House, 1992.
One Nation under God: The Triumph of the Native American Church. Editor, with Reuben Snake. Santa Fe, N.M.: Clear Light Publishers, 1996.
Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001.
The World’s Religions. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991. Revised and updated edition of The Religions of Man. New York: Harper & Row, 1958.
Other Resources
Videotapes: The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith. Directed by Pamela Mason Wagner. 1996. The Mystic’s Journey, with Huston Smith, 1997; three classic films: India and the Infinite: The Soul of a People; Islamic Mysticism: The Sufi Way; and Requiem for a Faith: Tibetan Buddhism.
“Some of us have survived this bloodiest of centuries; but if its ordeals are to be birth pangs rather than death throes, the century’s scientific advances must be matched by comparable advances in human relations.”
(1870–1966)
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One of the most famous interpreters of Zen Buddhism in the Western world, D. T. Suzuki was also among the first Japanese spokespersons to popularize the practice of Zen in the United States.
Born into a no-longer-privileged samurai family, Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki grew up in genteel poverty in northern Japan. His zeal for self-education, which included learning English, eventually led him to take classes at the Imperial University in Tokyo. He did not earn a degree there, but he did develop an interest in Zen training. He eventually became a lay student of Shaku Soen.
In 1893 Suzuki traveled with Shaku Soen to the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago. He translated into English Shaku Soen’s written speech and read it to the general assembly, thus indirectly becoming the first official voice of Zen on American soil. Four years later Suzuki returned to the United States to work with the Illinois-based publisher Paul Carus in translating Buddhist texts and writing his own commentaries. In 1906 he joined Shaku Soen in a nationwide tour during which both men gave talks on Zen.
D. T. Suzuki taught and wrote about Zen Buddhism for the benefit of Western students, among them writer Jack Kerouac and composer John Cage.
Suzuki returned to Japan immediately after this tour but came back to the United States in 1950 to teach Zen at Columbia University, an assignment that continued intermittently over the next eight years. Like Thich Nhat Hanh decades later, Suzuki was never confirmed as a Zen master—or teacher—in any formal lineage, but he made a life for himself in the West by teaching and writing about Zen for the benefit of Western lay practitioners. Among his more well-known students were the writer Jack Kerouac and the composer John Cage, both of whom reflected the influence of Zen in their works. Suzuki also evolved into a celebrated public figure, frequently interviewed by the media and much admired for his character, charm, and erudition.
HIS WORDS
An intuitive mind has its weaknesses, it is true, but its strongest point is demonstrated when it deals with things most fundamental in life, that is, things related to religion, art, and metaphysics. And it is Zen that has particularly established this fact—in satori [the experience of enlightenment]. The idea that the ultimate truth of life and of things generally is to be intuitively and not conceptually grasped, and that this intuitive prehension is the foundation not only of philosophy but of all other cultural activities, is what the Zen form of Buddhism has contributed to the cultivation of artistic appreciation among the Japanese people.
—Zen and Japanese Culture, p. 219
Let us first realize the fact that we thrive only when we are cooperative by being alive to the truth of the interrelationship of all things in existence. Let us then die to the notion of power and conquest and be resurrected to the eternal creativity of love, which is all-embracing and all-forgiving. As love flows out of rightly seeing reality as it is, it is also love that makes us feel that we—each of us individually and all of us collectively—are responsible for whatever things, good or evil, go on in our human community, and we must therefore strive to ameliorate or remove whatever conditions are inimical to the universal advancement of human welfare and wisdom.
—The Awakening of Zen, p. 70
Books by D. T. Suzuki
The Awakening of Zen. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1987.
Essays in Zen Buddhism. 1st ser. New York: Grove Press, 1961.
Essays in Zen Buddhism. 2d ser. York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1971.
An Introduction to Zen Buddhism. New York: Grove Press, 1960.
Manual of Zen Buddhism. New York: Grove Press, 1960.
Mysticism, Christian and Buddhist. New York: Harper & Row, 1957.
Shin Buddhism. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.
Zen and Japanese Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959.
“Let us then die to the notion of power and conquest and be resurrected to the eternal creativity of love, which is all-embracing and all-forgiving.”
(1909–1943)
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Although only a few of Simone Weil’s articles appeared in her lifetime, her posthumously published writing has made her one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, and a kind of patron saint to those who strive for the spiritual life outside organized religion.
Weil was born in Paris, into an intellectual, nonobservant Jewish family. From early childhood she exhibited the two passions that would guide her life: her thirst for knowledge and her concern for and identification with the oppressed and suffering—at the age of five she refused to eat sugar when she learned that French soldiers in World War I were not rationed it. She attended the most prestigious French schools, where she excelled, graduating at the head of her class at the École Normale Supérièure, one place ahead of her classmate Simone de Beauvoir.
Weil spent the first years after her graduation as a secondary school philosophy teacher and, increasingly, as a left-leaning political activist, although she never aligned herself with any particular political philosophy. She felt an imperative to experience the plight of the worker firsthand. To that end, in the midst of generally frail health, she harvested grapes, worked in a Renault factory, and fought with the Republican army in the Spanish Civil War, all the while pouring herself into the philosophical essays and fragments for which she is now known.
Weil gained a profound love for Jesus and the Christian faith—yet she felt it her special calling to remain a believer outside the church, as a witness to its history of oppression and abuse of power.
In 1938, while visiting the Benedictine Abbey at Solesmes, France, Weil had the first of several overwhelming mystical experiences, in which she gained a profound love for Jesus and the Christian faith—yet she felt it her special calling to remain a believer outside the church, as a witness to its history of oppression and abuse of power. Never baptized, she remained an odd kind of Christian-outside-the-church for the rest of her brief life, and her writings began to focus on her newfound faith and to reflect on her struggle to express the unusual position to which she found herself called. Written in the language of philosophy rather than in standard Christian jargon, her work exhibits a striking freshness and integrity. Weil stands as a role model for everyone who has struggled honestly with faith in the face of mistrust of organized religion, showing how a profound faith can be experienced outside religious institutions.
In 1942 she fled France for England, where she worked in Charles de Gaulle’s Free French movement. In 1943 she contracted tuberculosis, from which she died. Throughout the course of her illness Weil refused food and medical treatment as an act of solidarity with her countrymen in occupied France.
HER WORDS
We experience good only by doing it.
We experience evil only by refusing to allow ourselves to do it, or, if we do it, by repenting of it.
When we do evil we do not know it, because evil flies from the light.
—“The Great Beast,” in The Simone Weil Reader, p. 393
Religion, insofar as it is a sense of consolation, is a hindrance to true faith; and in this sense atheism is a purification.
—“Contemplation of the Divine,” in The Simone Weil Reader, p. 412
Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of our neighbor, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance. Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough.
—“Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” in The Simone Weil Reader, p. 51
Books by Simone Weil
Gravity and Grace. New York: Routledge, 1992.
The Simone Weil Reader. Edited by George Panichas. New York: Schocken Books, 1987.
Waiting for God. New York: Ballantine Books, 1970.
Books about Simone Weil
Coles, Robert. Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage. Woodstock, Vt.: SkyLight Paths, 2000.
Petrement, Simone. Simone Weil: A Life. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Schocken Books, 1976.
“Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of our neighbor, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance.”