Tag: language

“In Saïs, the statue of Athena, whom they equate with Isis, bore the inscription: ‘I am all that has been, and is, and shall be; no mortal has yet raised my veil.’

—Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris, § 9 (354 C).

“Christ did not hide truths in order to prevent them from being communicated, but in order to provoke desire for them by this very concealment.”

—Saint Augustine: Sermons, 51, 4, 5.

“The more these things seem to be obscured by figurative words, the sweeter they become when they are explained.”

—Saint Augustine: On Christian Doctrine, iv, vii, 15.

“But in order that manifest truths should not become tiring, they have been covered with a veil, while remaining unchanged, and thus they become the object of desire; being desired, they are in a way made young again; with their youth restored, they enter the spirit gently.”

—Saint Augustine: Letters, 137, V, 18.

“The plain fact is that not
all facts are plain…’The Lord whose oracle is at Delphi,’ said Heraclitus referring to Apollo the god
and symbol of wisdom, ‘neither speaks nor conceals but gives signs.’… There are
meanings of high, sometimes of very high importance, which cannot be stated in
terms strictly defined….Plain speech may sometimes have conceptual exactitude,
but it will be inaccurate with respect to the new thing that one wants to say, the
freshly imagined experience that one wants to describe and communicate.”

— Philip Wheelwright, The Burning Fountain: A Study in the Language of Symbolism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), p. 86.

“These things are veiled in figures, in garments as it were, in order that they may exercise the mind of the pious inquirer, and not become cheap for being bare and obvious … For being remote, they are more ardently desired, and for being desired they are more joyfully discovered.”

—Saint Augustine: Against Lying, X, 24.

“Vielleicht ist nie etwas Erhabeneres gesagt oder eine Gedanke erhabener ausgedrückt worden als in jener Aufschrift über dem Tempel der Isis (der Mutter Natur): ‘Ich bin alles was da ist, was da war und was da sein wird, und meinen Schleier hat kein Sterblicher aufgedeckt.’”

“[Perhaps nothing more sublime has ever been said or a thought has been expressed more sublimely, than in that inscription on the temple of Isis (Mother Nature): ‘I am all that is, that has been, and that shall be, and no mortal has raised my veil.’]”

—Immanuel Kant: Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790. (§ 49, footnote.)

[…] One can love God, but it is only
By giving you a name: this name, stone, your name,
And taking you thus, with open eyes
Into our room of names, our refuge.
We cannot think
Toward the outside. We cannot
Conceive of that without name,
Without room for meaning,
This we cannot do, it would be for our feet
To trip over a cadaver in a tomb.
For it is death, in fact,
That alone does not signify,
It is death alone that, under each word, hides itself,
And if the sound at the bottom of a word catches us, sometimes,
When we stumble over one syllable,
If it is then something within us that suddenly
Does not speak, does not signify, is only a chasm,
We recoil from the rim of the chasm
Tottering, legs heavy with vertigo,
And we let ourselves fall
Into the dense grass of the world that we are.
And if God is only a thing,
Why would we desire him? He, the outside,
He who would ravage all our memories […]

Yves Bonnefoy (trans. Thade Correa) from Passerby, Do you want to know? in ASYMPTOTE  (via mothwood)