22 quotes
Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
The operations of the human mind are also controlled by words of power, formulas that become a focus of mental activity.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
The apocalypse is the way the world looks after the ego has disappeared.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
The supremacy of the verbal over the monumental has something about it of the supremacy of life over death.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
The objective world is the order of nature, thinking or reflection follows the suggestions of sense experience, and words are the servomechanisms of reflection.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
We have revolutionary thought whenever the feeling "life is a dream" becomes geared to an impulse to awaken from it.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation,revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
The bedrock of doubt is the total nothingness of death. Death is a leveler, not because everybody dies, but because nobody understands what death means.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
Failure to grasp centrifugal meaning is incomplete reading; failure to grasp centripetal meaning is incompetent reading.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
The first thing that confronts us in studying verbal structures is that they are arranged sequentially, and have to be read or listened to in time.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
It seems clear that the Bible belongs to an area of language in which metaphor is functional, and where we have to surrender precision for flexibility.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
The Book of Revelation, difficult as it may be for "literalists," becomes much simpler when we read it typologically, as a mosiac of allusions to Old Testament prophecy.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
Those who do succeed in reading the Bible from beginning to end will discover that at least it has a beginning and an end, and some traces of a total structure.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
The written word is far more powerful than simply a reminder: it re-creates the past in the present, and gives us, not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the summoned-up hallucination.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
The entire Bible, viewed as a "divine comedy," is contained within a U-shaped story of this sort, one in which man, as explained, loses the tree and water of life at the beginning of Genesis and gets them back at the end of Revelation.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)