In Jewish Bankers and the Holy See (2012), León Poliakov cites a joke current in 12th-century ghettos to justify usury between Jews.
“It consisted, it is said, of reciting Deuteronomy 23:20 in interrogative tones to make it mean the opposite of its obvious sense:
“‘Unto a foreigner thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury?'”
Some say “If God sees everything before
It happens — and deceived He cannot be —
Then everything must happen, though you swore
The contrary, for He has seen it, He.”
And so I say, if from eternity
God has foreknowledge of our thought and deed,
We’ve no free choice, whatever books we read.
— Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde
If … we were asked to select one monument of human civilization that should survive to some future age … we should probably choose the works of Shakespeare. In them we recognize the truest portrait and best memorial of man. Yet the archæologists of that future age … would misconceive our life in one important respect. They would hardly understand that man had had a religion. …
Shakespeare could be idealistic when he dreamed, as he could be spiritual when he reflected. … It is all the more remarkable, therefore, that we should have to search through all the works of Shakespeare to find half a dozen passages that have so much as a religious sound, and that even these passages, upon examination, should prove not to be the expression of any deep religious conception. If Shakespeare had been without metaphysical capacity, or without moral maturity, we could have explained his strange insensibility to religion; but as it is, we must marvel at his indifference and ask ourselves what can be the causes of it.
— George Santayana, “The Absence of Religion in Shakespeare,” in Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, 1900
Can omniscient God, who
Knows the future, find
The omnipotence to
Change His future mind?
— Karen Owens
Imagine a set of people all living in the same building. Half of them think it is a hotel, the other half think it is a prison. Those who think it a hotel might regard it as quite intolerable, and those who thought it was a prison might decide that it was really surprisingly comfortable. So that what seems the ugly doctrine is one that comforts and strengthens you in the end. The people who try to hold an optimistic view of this world would become pessimists: the people who hold a pretty stern view of it become optimistic.
— C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock, 1970
In 840 the Frankish Benedictine monk Rabanus Maurus composed 28 poems in which each line comprises the same number of letters. That’s impressive enough, but he also added painted images behind each poem that identify subsets of its letters that can be read on their own.
The final poem of the volume shows Rabanus Maurus himself kneeling in prayer at the foot of a cross whose text forms a palindrome: OROTE RAMUS ARAM ARA SUMAR ET ORO (I, Ramus, pray to you at the altar so that at the altar I may be taken up, I also pray). This text appears on both arms of the cross, so it can be read in any of four directions.
The form of the monk’s own body defines a second message: “Rabanum memet clemens rogo Christe tuere o pie judicio” (Christ, o pious and merciful in your judgment, keep me, Rabanus, I pray, safe).
And the letters in both of these painted sections also participate in the larger poem that fills the body of the page.
(From Laurence de Looze, The Letter and the Cosmos, 2016.)
In 1805 a disturbed Venice shoemaker named Matthew Lovat nearly managed to crucify himself. From William Wood Seymour’s The Cross in Tradition, History, and Art, 1898:
Having prepared a cross, he stripped himself naked except for a girdle about his loins. Fearing that he would not be able to attach himself securely to the cross, he covered the lower part with a net, extending from the suppedaneum to the transverse. Having introduced himself into this, he next drove a nail through the palm of his right hand by striking it on the floor until the point appeared on the outside. He then drove a nail through both feet, fastening them to the wood. Tying himself around the waist to the cross, he next wounded himself in the side with a knife. He was yet in the room: to show himself to the people required the exercise of much fortitude and resolution. The foot of the cross having been placed upon the window-sill, he drew himself forward by means of his fingers pressing on the floor, until the lower end, overbalancing the rest, the cross fell outside of the house and hung by ropes previously fixed to sustain it. He then fastened the right hand, already pierced by the nail, to its proper place, but after driving the nail through the left hand he was unable to affix it. This took place at eight o’clock in the morning. As soon as he was seen he was taken down and carried to the hospital where his wounds were completely cured.
I haven’t been able to learn why he thought this was necessary. After an earlier attempt was prevented, “Being interrogated repeatedly as to the motive for his self-crucifixion, he maintained an obstinate silence, except, that he once said to his brother, that that day was the festival of St. Matthew, and that he could give no farther explanation.” After the 1805 attempt, he would say only, “The pride of man must be mortified, it must expire on the cross.” He starved himself to death in an asylum shortly afterward.
In 2018 a team of researchers at the University of North Carolina presented 511 American Christians with randomly paired pictures of faces and asked them to identify which of the pair more closely resembled the face of God. By combining the selected faces, the psychologists could produce a composite image of the Creator as envisioned by various groups. (Here, the image on the left is God as young participants imagine him; the one on the right is how he’s seen by older participants.)
Liberals tend to imagine that God is younger, more feminine, and more loving than conservatives, and African-Americans picture a God who looks more African-American than Caucasians do, but the traditional image of the powerful older man with the flowing beard is nowhere to be seen.
“People’s tendency to believe in a God that looks like them is consistent with an egocentric bias,” said senior author Kurt Gray. “People often project their beliefs and traits onto others, and our study shows that God’s appearance is no different — people believe in a God who not only thinks like them, but also looks like them.”
One exception, though: Men and women believed in an equally masculine-looking God.
(Joshua Conrad Jackson, Neil Hester, and Kurt Gray, “The Faces of God in America: Revealing Religious Diversity Across People and Politics,” PLOS One, June 11, 2018.)
In his 2014 book Describing Gods, Graham Oppy presents the “divine liar” paradox, by SUNY philosopher Patrick Grim:
1. X believes that (1) is not true.
If we suppose that (1) is true, then this tells us that X believes that (1) is not true. But if an omniscient being believes that (1) is not true, then it follows that (1) is not true. So the assumption that (1) is true leads to a contradiction.
Suppose instead that (1) is not true. That is, suppose that it’s not the case that X believes that (1) is not true. If an omniscient being fails to believe that (1) is not true, then it’s not true that (1) is not true. So this alternative also leads to a contradiction.
But, on the assumption that there is an omniscient being X, either it’s the case that (1) is true or it’s the case that (1) is not true.
“So, on pain of contradiction,” Oppy explains, “we seem driven to the conclusion that there is no omniscient being X.”
(Also: Patrick Grim, “Some Neglected Problems of Omniscience,” American Philosophical Quarterly 20:3 [July 1983], 265-276.)
In 1711, Belgian abbott Lucas de Vriese filled an unpublished book with 3,100 anagrams composed on phrases taken from the Latin version of the Bible. Page 81 is called the “echo page,” because the first word of each line echoes the last word of the preceding line. Each line is an anagram of the opening sentence of “Hail Mary”: Ave Maria gratia plena dominus tecum (Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee) occurring in Luke 1:28. Impressively, the whole thing is also an acrostic — taking the first letter of each line spells out the original quotation:
Amacula ter munda, ita per omnia viges.
Viges, enormi mulcta Adami pura enata.
Enata Malis pura vige, ac merito Munda.
Munda Mater emicas, o pura Geniti Aula.
Aula Dei micat, nota summe pura, Regina.
Regina, o Tu pura macula, et Dia Immensa.
Immensa, o Tu diva integre pura ac alma.
Alma ter unice pura Summa io Dei Gnata.
Gnata Dei, pura es communi a Mali reatu.
Reatu magno pura, micat sine lue Adami.
Adami sine omni macula pura, rege tuta.
Tuta o pergas alma ac nimia munda jure.
Iure mero Genita munda a culpis, Amata.
Amata veni Summa Regina, delicto pura.
Pura et ter divina o gemmas, Amica luna.
Luna pura (mira dico) Agni Stemmate Eva.
Eva, i matris culpa e gremio munda nata.
Nata maledicti pura, o vere Summi Agna.
Agna Coeli summa, et Avi ter pura damni.
Damni tu pura Regia es, et a macula omni.
Omni reatu, ac Avi plagis e matre munda.
Munda tu pia merito maculae es ignara.
Ignara culpae mera, o Summi Tu Dei Nata
Nata Pura Medica, et gloria Summa veni.
Veni multa munda, Pia et a gremio Sacra.
Sacra nimie munda, alme pura vige tota.
Tota piaculis munda mera, germina Eva.
Eva o simul prima et munda genita, Cara.
Cara, imo Summi Nata, et digne pura, vale.
Vale, o mendi pura Mater, ac Vitis Magna.
Magna, o sic pura ad literam, vive. Amen.
Here’s a rough translation, from City University of Hong Kong mathematician Felipe Cucker’s Manifold Mirrors: The Crossing Paths of the Arts and Mathematics:
Thrice clean from stain, that is why you blossom.
You blossom after being born free of Adam’s great curse.
Born of sinners, you blossom pure and clean, due to your own merit.
Clean you shine, Mother, oh pure Temple of the Only Begotten Son.
God’s Temple shines, famous for its great purity, oh Queen.
Oh Queen, you who are free of stain, incommensurable Divine.
Oh incommensurable, you are divine, immaculately pure and nourishing.
Nourishing, thrice peerlessly pure, oh greatest daughter of God.
Daughter of God, you are free from original sin.
Free from the greatest sin, you shine free from Adam’s curse.
Pure, clean of Adam’s stain, protected queen.
Continue protected, oh nourishing and so justly clean.
Justly Daughter free from guilt, Beloved.
Come, oh Beloved, greatest Queen, free from guilt.
Pure and thrice divine, you are adorned with gems, oh loving moon.
Pure moon (I speak of marvelous deeds), Eve of the Lamb’s lineage.
Eve, go, born free from guilt in her mother’s womb.
Born free from blame, truly Lamb of the Highest.
Greatest Lamb of Heaven and thrice free from the Ancestor’s harm.
You, oh, Queen, are free from harm and from stain.
From all sin and from the Ancestor’s calamities you are free since birth.
Clean through your own merit pious, you have not known any stain.
Merely ignorant of the guilt, oh you, born from God the Highest.
Born Pure, Healer, come also oh Highest in glory.
Come clean from punishment, Pious and Holy from your mother’s womb.
Sacred, mightily clean, motherly pure, you live protected.
Bloom protected, you, the only one clean from expiatory punishment, Eve.
Oh Eve, first born as well as clean, Beloved.
Beloved, truly born from the Highest and fittingly pure, be strong.
Be strong, oh Mother free from fault, and Great Vineyard.
Great, oh truly pure, live. Amen.
(Via Walter Begley’s Biblia Anagrammatica, or, The Anagramatic Bible, 1904.)