Pacifists

"The doctrine of predestination and eternal punishment gave him particular difficulty, and by the time he was seventeen he had become an avowed skeptic, discarding the Bible and the creeds of the churches."

"An examination of Russell's eschatalogy reveals that he was an avid reader, and if not a plagiarist, certainly was given to "creative adaptation". The current leadership of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society likes to claim a special spiritual authority from God that they trace back to Russell. They would have the world believe that Russell uniquely understood the "times and seasons" that he had found himself in, and that he was led by God to understand the element of chronology that is the backbone of their belief system to this day. Although the vast majority of millenarian groups ultimately abandoned their theories, the Watch Tower system is basically a carryover of stale nineteenth-century Adventism."

"Grothendieck’s undertaking throve thanks to unexpected synergies: the immense capacity for synthesis and for work of Dieudonné, promoted to the rank of scribe, the rigorous, rationalist and well-informed spirit of Serre, the practical know-how in geometry and algebra of Zariski’s students, the juvenile freshness of the great disciple Pierre Deligne, all acted as counterweights to the adventurous, visionary and wildly ambitious spirit of Grothendieck."

"Applications in arithmetic geometry (such as Weil conjectures, Ramanujan conjecture, Mordell conjecture, Shafarevich conjecture, Tate conjectures) are unthinkable in the classical style, these really need Grothendieck's foundations of algebraic geometry."

"Many mathematicians are rather childlike, unworldly in some sense, but Grothendieck more than most. He just seemed like an innocent—not very sophisticated, no pretense, no sham. He thought very clearly and explained things very patiently, without any sense of superiority. He wasn’t contaminated by civilization or power or one-up-manship."

"He really never worked on examples, I only understand things through examples and then gradually make them more abstract. I don’t think it helped Grothendieck in the least to look at an example. He really got control of the situation by thinking of it in absolutely the most abstract possible way. It’s just very strange. That’s the way his mind worked."

"No one but Grothendieck could have taken on algebraic geometry in the full generality he adopted and seen it through to success. It required courage, even daring, total self confidence and immense powers of concentration and hard work. Grothendieck was a phenomenon."

"Many people who knew Grothendieck during his time at I.H.E.S. speak of his kindness, his openness to any kind of question, his gentle humor. He was often barefoot. He fasted once a week in opposition to the war in Vietnam. Mazur recalled that Grothendieck had met a family at the local train station with nowhere to stay, and he invited them to live in the basement apartment of his home. He had a machine installed that helped make taramasalata—a fish-roe spread—so that they could sell prepared food at the market."

"I can illustrate the ... approach with the ... image of a nut to be opened. The first analogy that came to my mind is of immersing the nut in some softening liquid, and why not simply water? From time to time you rub so the liquid penetrates better, and otherwise you let time pass. The shell becomes more flexible through weeks and months — when the time is ripe, hand pressure is enough, the shell opens like a perfectly ripened avocado! A different image came to me a few weeks ago. The unknown thing to be known appeared to me as some stretch of earth or hard marl, resisting penetration ... the sea advances insensibly in silence, nothing seems to happen, nothing moves, the water is so far off you hardly hear it ... yet finally it surrounds the resistant substance."

"In Récoltes et Semailles, Grothendieck counts his twelve disciples. The central character is Pierre Deligne, who combines in this tale the features of John, "the disciple whom Jesus loved”", and Judas the betrayer. The weight of symbols!"

"It is less than four years since cohomological methods (i.e. methods of Homological Algebra) were introduced into Algebraic Geometry in Serre's fundamental paper[11], and it seems certain that they are to overflow the part of mathematics in the coming years, from the foundations up to the most advanced parts. ... [11] Serre, J. P. Faisceaux algébriques cohérents. Ann. Math. (2), 6, 197–278 (1955)."

"The introduction of the digit 0 or the group concept was general nonsense too, and mathematics was more or less stagnating for thousands of years because nobody was around to take such childish steps..."

"Alexandre Grothendieck was very different from Weil in the way he approached mathematics: Grothendieck was not just a mathematician who could understand the discipline and prove important results—he was a man who could create mathematics. And he did it alone."

"The question you raise “how can such a formulation lead to computations” doesn’t bother me in the least! Throughout my whole life as a mathematician, the possibility of making explicit, elegant computations has always come out by itself, as a byproduct of a thorough conceptual understanding of what was going on. Thus I never bothered about whether what would come out would be suitable for this or that, but just tried to understand – and it always turned out that understanding was all that mattered."

"Jean Dieudonné and Laurent Schwartz were able to discipline Grothendieck just enough to prevent him from running off in all directions, and to restrain his excessive attraction to extreme generality."

"We should ask our fellow physicists to invent a principle of anti-interference, which would bring light out of two obscurities (Leray and Grothendieck)."

"Weil's new mathematical language, algebraic geometry, had enabled him to articulate subtleties about solutions to equations that hitherto had been impossible. But if there was any hope of extending Weil's ideas to prove the Riemann Hypothesis, it was clear they would need to be developed beyond the foundations he had laid in his prison cell in Rouen. It would be another mathematician from Paris who would bring the bones of Weil's new language to life. The master architect who performed this task was one of the strangest and most revolutionary mathematicians of the twentieth century - Alexandre Grothendieck."

"Whether or not our position fairly can be charged as “apolitical” depends entirely upon how one defines “political.” If “political” be taken in the narrow sense, as signifying those means and methods the world regularly accepts as normative for its doing of politics, then the position of me and mine clearly and is that of apoliticism. If, however, “political” be understood in the broad, etymological sense, as identifying whatever actions have public effect upon the life of the “city” (polis), then there are no grounds for accusing either “me” or any of “mine” of advocating apoliticism."

"Authorities ... are where they are only because God is allowing them to be there. They exist only at his sufferance. And if God is willing to put up with...the Roman Empire, you ought to be willing to put up with it, too. There is no indication God has called you to clear it out of the way or get it converted for him. You can't fight an Empire without becoming like the Roman Empire; so you had better leave such matters in God's hands where they belong."

"Paul Ricœur speaks of the theologian as a hermeneut, whose task is to interpret the multivalent, rich metaphors arising from the symbolic bases of tradition so that the symbols may 'speak' once again to our existential situation."

"Ricoeur distinguishes between two forms of hermeneutics: a hermeneutics of faith which aims to restore meaning to a text and a hermeneutics of suspicion which attempts to decode meanings that are disguised."

"French philosopher Paul Ricœur (1913–2005), in his book “De l’interprétation. Essai sur Sigmund Freud,” published in 1965, coined the expression “school of suspicion” to describe the collective cultural aim of such famous authors as Karl Marx (1818–1883), Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). While proclaiming very different and even opposite philosophies, in Ricœur’s view the ultimate attempt of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche was to teach that reality itself cannot be trusted and fundamentally lies, and that all existing authorities are false. As “masters” (or teachers) “of suspicion,” their credo was not the legitimate critique of existing authorities for their mistakes and misdeeds, but the basic delegitimization of the very concept of authority in itself."

"In 1965, French philosopher Paul Ricœur called Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud the three “maîtres du soupçon,” the “masters of suspicion” that made us regard the conscience as something suspect. Because of these three ideologues, many no longer trust their conscience. They are no longer sure that it is the innate voice of God or human nature. What if the “masters of suspicion” were right, and what we call the voice of conscience is in fact the voice of those who want to deny us the right to revolution, to power, and to pleasure, who have instilled in us their pseudo-values and taught us to call them conscience?"

"The "hermeneutics of suspicion" is a phrase coined by Paul Ricoeur to capture a common spirit that pervades the writings of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. In spite of their obvious differences, he argued, these thinkers jointly constitute a "school of suspicion." That is to say, they share a commitment to unmasking "the lies and illusions of consciousness;" they are the architects of a distinctively modern style of interpretation that circumvents obvious or self-evident meanings in order to draw out less visible and less flattering truths (Ricoeur 356). Ricoeur’s term has sustained an energetic after-life within religious studies, as well as in philosophy, intellectual history, and related fields[.]"

"I dislike those who present myself as a Protestant philosopher; I am a philosopher and a Protestant."

"If we go back to the intention [Marx, Nietzsche and Freud] had in common, we find in it the decision to look upon the whole of consciousness primarily as "false" consciousness."

"The possibility of noncongruence, of discrepancy, in many ways already presupposes that individuals as well as collective entities are related to their own lives and to social reality not only in the mode of participation without distance but precisely in the mode of noncongruence. ... The presupposition here is precisely that of a social imagination, operating in both constructive and destructive ways, as both confirmation and contestation of the present situation."

"People do things, and then they imagine what they are doing in a kind of cloudy realm. Thus we say first there is a social reality in which people fight to earn their living, and so on, and this is real reality, as praxis. This reality is then represented in the heaven of ideas, but it is falsely represented as having a meaning autonomous to this realm, as making sense on the basis of things which can be thought and not done or lived. The claim against ideology therefore comes from a kind of realism of life, a realism of practical life for which praxis is the alternative concept to ideology. Marx's system is materialist precisely in its insistence that the materiality of praxis precedes the ideality of ideas."

"In economic theory the conclusions are sometimes less interesting than the route by which they are reached."

"The attack and claim which are so unmistakable in the New Testament were muted and neutralized by the official recognition, the cultural integration and the social control of Christianity as a middle-class institution."

"In its resistance to the great attack on traditional dogma launched by the Enlightenment, the Protestant theology of the 19th century … had very largely agreed in taking up a defensive position in which the truth of Christian faith was to be proved by demonstrating the indispensability of religious feeling to all higher humanity. … Yet on this basis it was not possible to refute the contention of Ludwig Feuerbach that the secret of theology is anthropology. … The secret of God was in truth that of self-glorifying man speaking of God and extolling his own divinity."

"Perhaps the most influential theorist in England today is Nicholas Kaldor (Hungary), and undoubtedly the most original is Piero Sraffa (Italy)."

"There are two things in Sraffa. One of them is very close to Keynes and that's the part that the Sraffians ignore and that is, Sraffa wrote a criticism of Hayek's capital theory book in 1932, and it's in that criticism that Sraffa developed this theory of spot and forward markets, and it's that theory which Keynes latched onto in his spot-forward market analysis. So there's a very good connection between Sraffa and the spot-forward markets. The other thing which they've latched onto, what was really anti-Keynesian, is The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. It has nothing to do with real world or with economics - it's an attack to show that the neoclassical system doesn't work. There are lots of ways of showing that it doesn't work, but basically the way Sraffa shows it doesn't work is by assuming that there's no substitutability between labour and capital. It's a fixed-coefficient system. So what? You know, the old neoclassicists would have said that wages were inflexible. It's the same thing. Real wages are inflexible in the Sraffian system. What does it prove? I don't think it proves anything."

"The non-Christian can put no question which is not necessarily that of the Christian dogmatician as well. ... In solidarity with the non-Christian, he has no prior knowledge. He must begin from the very beginning with no presupposed consciousness of God. He must learn to spell out the message which comes to him as to every man."

"In water lives the fish, the plant in the ground, The bird in the sky, the sun in the firmament, The salamander must with fire be sustained, And God's Heart is Jacob Boehme's element."

"Jacob Boehme has to be termed the greatest of Christian gnostics. The word gnosis I employ here not in the sense of the heresies of the first centuries of Christianity, but in the sense of knowledge basic to revelation and dealing not with concepts, but with symbols and myths; contemplative knowledge, and not discursive knowledge. This is also a religious philosophy or theosophy. Characteristic for J. Boehme is that he had a great simplicity of heart, a child-like purity of soul."

"The mystery of God's creation, the creative mystery of the creature involves not only the being saved from sin, but also of bearing within it the imprint of the Creator and being pervaded with Divine energies, this has remained hidden over time. Upon this mystery have touched only a few Christian mystics and genuine theosophists, gnostics, ahead of their time. The greatest of them was J. Boehme. But the thought of modern times has tended to naturalise Boehme's intuition about the mystery of the world-creation, the mystery of the creature, and it has become bereft, of what Boehme revealed."

"This is understood by none but the Children of Christ, who have known it by Experience. When Christ the Corner-stone stirreth himself in the extinguished Image of Man, in his hearty Conversion and Repentance, then Virgin Sophia appeareth in the Stirring of the Spirit of Christ in the extinguished Image, in her Virgin's Attire before the Soul; at which the Soul is so amazed and astonished in its Uncleanness, that all its Sins immediately awake in it, and it trembleth before her; for then the Judgement passeth upon the Sins of the Soul, so that it even goeth back in its Unworthiness, being ashamed in the Presence of its fair Love, and entereth into itself, feeling and acknowledging itself utterly unworthy to receive such a Jewel. This is understood by those who are of our Tribe, and have tasted of this Heavenly Gift, and by none else. But the noble Sophia draweth near in the Essence of the Soul, and kisseth it in friendly Manner, and tinctureth its dark Fire with her Rays of Love, and shineth through it with her bright and powerful Influence. Penetrated with the strong Sense and Feeling of which, the Soul skippeth in its Body for great Joy, and in the Strength of this Virgin Love exulteth, and praiseth the great God for his blessed Gift of Grace."

"And hereupon, Sir, I will declare unto you, out of my small gifts and knowledge: What a Christian is, and wherefore he is called a Christian. Namely, that he only is a Christian, who is become capable of this high title in himself, and hath resigned himself with his inward ground, mind, and will to the free grace in Christ Jesus, and is in the will of his soul become as a young child, that only longeth after the breasts of the mother, that sincerely panteth after the mother, and sucketh the breasts of the mother whereof it liveth."

"If thou wilt use these Words aright, and art in good Earnest, thou shalt certainly find the Benefit thereof. But I desire thou mayest be warned, if thou art not in Earnest, not to meddle with the dear Names of God, in and by which the most High Holiness is invoked, moved, and powerfully desired, lest they kindle the Anger of God in thy Soul. For we must not abuse the Holy Names of God. This little Book is only for those that would fain repent, and are in a Desire to begin. Such will find what Manner of Words therein, and whence they are born. Be you herewith commended to the Eternal Goodness and Mercy of God."

"A man must come to the practice, effectual performance, and fruitfulness in Christianity, otherwise the new birth is not yet manifest in him, nor the noble branch yet born; no tickling or soothing, comforting with promises or Scripture evidences, and boasting of a faith, doth avail any man at all, if the faith make him not a child conformable to God in essence and will, which faith bringeth forth divine fruit."

"Boehme's teachings present the challenging tasks of a new Christian anthropology, of the surmounting of the slavery subjection of man under the Old Testament consciousness, in a bold attempt at discerning the mysteries of the creation within the light of Christ. Boehme is not a theologian, he is — a theosophist in the finest sense of the word, and his contemplations are not easily to be carried over into the traditional theological language. Least of all was Boehme an "heretic" as regards the condition of his heart, as regards his spiritual disposition, and the final resolution of this question does not belong to the academic school theological teachings. … Many of us, as Orthodox Russians of the XX Century, think otherwise, than might a German craftsman of genius from the late XVI and early XVII Centuries, but we can sense in him a brother after the spirit, his thought resonates for us, and we can find common issue with it beyond all the separate faith-confessions and nationalities, beyond all the separate times and places, just as we ought to find common cause with everything spiritually genuine that is lofty and high, even though it appear a foreign world for us."

"A real true Christian hath no controversy or contention with anybody; for, in the resignation in Christ, he dieth from all controversy and strife; he asketh no more after the way to God, but wholly surrenders himself to the mother, namely, unto the spirit of Christ; and whatsoever it doth with him it is all one to him; be it prosperity or adversity in this world — life or death — it is all alike unto him; no adversity or calamity reacheth the new man, but only the old man of this world. With the same the world may do what it pleaseth: it belongeth unto the world; but the new man belongeth to God."

"Pythagoras and Plato and Boehme and Paracelsus and Thomas Vaughan were men who bore their lamps amidst their fellowmen in life under a hail of nonunderstanding and abuse. Anyone could approach them, but only a few were able to discern the superearthly radiance behind the earthly face. It is possible to name great Servitors of East and West, North and South. It is possible to peruse their biographies; yet everywhere we feel that the superearthly radiance appears rarely in the course of centuries. One should learn from reality. (175)"

"There are as many blasphemies in this shoemaker's book as there are lines; it smells of shoemaker's pitch and filthy blacking. May this insufferable stench be far from us. The Arian poison was not so deadly as this shoemaker's poison."

"I must tell you, sir, that yesterday the pharisaical devil was let loose, cursed me and my little book, and condemned the book to the fire. He charged me with shocking vices; with being a scorner of both Church and Sacraments, and with getting drunk daily on brandy, wine, and beer; all of which is untrue; while he himself is a drunken man."

"The fundamental task which Bohme has set himself is to apprehend God, and in this light to apprehend the world. The God whom Bohme seeks to know is not any kind of a God, an unknown God, such as is sought after the fashion of earthly philosophers, without any presuppositions whatever, while the thinker, like Robinson Crusoe, speculates in perfect isolation, gazing out from the solitary island of his own thought into the abstract infinity of the ocean and horizon. The God, whom Bohme seeks to know, is the God of Christianity, the God of revelation and of the Church, in whom he believes, the God who is Holiness and Love, whose manifestation he is absolutely certain of, but whose depths he desires to explore."

"We men have one book in common which points to God. Each has it within himself, which is the priceless Name of God. Its letters are the flames of His love, which He out of His heart in the priceless Name of Jesus has revealed in us. Read these letters in your hearts and spirits and you have books enough. All the writings of the children of God direct you unto that one book, for therein lie all the treasures of wisdom. … This book is Christ in you."

"“The fact is that we have realized that in labour disputes the use of violence plays into the hands of the ruling classes justifying the reaction of the military and discrediting the forces from below. Besides the refusal to use violence achieves the possibility of establishing even international solidarities of a very wide range”."

"“Today we have a very important case for the choice between obedience and disobedience because the nuclear arms race could lead to the most terrible war there has ever been, reducing Europe to complete destruction. Perhaps never as today to ‘disobey’ is to obey the universal conscience; to disobey the written laws is to obey the unwritten law, which tells us to be united with all being; to disobey the cult of the present empires in the name of the community, which will tomorrow be really of everybody. Conscientious objection is today evolving from being a personal stand in front of the terrible law to have to * “kill” human beings, to becoming a warning to everybody of the terrible danger of atomic destruction. This is a precise example of a disobedience, which would seem individual, and instead becomes a precious good for everyone."