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Articles

The Gods of Spinoza & Teilhard de Chardin

Derek Harrison compares radically alternative visions of the absolute.

“I saw eternity the other night.
Like a great ring of pure and endless light.”
– Henry Vaughan

Vaughan’s simile is an attempt to reach for an image for something that is not easily put into words. He is to be admired for trying to make visual a concept that, because it escapes the finite world of space-time, escapes the normal range of our human understanding as well. With words like ‘great’, ‘pure’, ‘endless’, and ‘light’, Vaughan could just as well have been describing the traditional Western idea of God.

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