Great Soul

At other times Stendhal, looking back, observes himself to have been natural, yet to have failed to benefit from it. This, I believe, is a central problem in Stendhal s life and fiction a person who is capable of inspiring love in another is so by virtue of character traits that also make it impossible for him or her to reach out to the other and consummate the love. The happy few, the great souls, do not reveal themselves to each other. Indeed they cannot, for in doing so they would reveal themselves not to be among the elect. Stendhal frequently refers to his pudeur, a term with overtones of modesty, delicacy and shame.11 By implication, this is what makes him worthy of being loved by definition, it is what prevents him from telling his love. 

Accidents such as Nimrod lead to very thorough investigations and great soul-searching amongst all the people involved, directly and indirectly. 

In a manner comparable to Christian eschatology, alchemical literature insisted on its own purificatory rituals that involved the preliminary torture, death and dismemberment of the prima materia. The canonical Catholic depiction of Christ s sacrificed body was a primary source for sixteenth and seventeenth century illustrations of the tortured body in anatomical and alchemical publications. In eflfect, the practice of Paracelsian alchemical medicine and surgery had a sacramental connotation, since the physician acted on the human body in the same manner as God worked on the great universal Macrocosmic Body. In like manner, the Paracelsian physician introduced the universal panacea, a liquid form of the philosopher s stone, into the alchemical alembic that was the Microcosmic human body. This alchemical medicine was permeated with the starry virtues of the heavens and the grace of Christ s Spirit, redeeming the body and soul of the patient by granting him not only an extended life on earth, but even eternal salvation. 

For a moment I held Edward s soul up to God, for if he had indeed a great need of forgiveness, who on this earth had earned it more hardly ... 

Alchemy implied, in sensation itself, a peaceful and detached love of the world. For the world of alchemy, like that of the "mythological" traditions whose heritage it transmitted, was a world at once living and transparent, a great a sacred body, an immense Anthropos in all respects resembling the small one. Nature, it could be said, was at once the body of God and the body of man. Everywhere was life, everywhere soul, everywhere the holy breath of God... 

The Gnostics termed the solar, or rainbow body, the robe of glory — robe meaning a vesture or sheath for the spirit. The poet Bardesanes wrote The Hymn of the Robe of Glory, which tells of the soul s descent into matter and its ultimate re-ascent. The pearl mentioned at the end of the poem, is the pearl of Great Price, the Philosopher s Stone ... 

Here 1 stand and offer unto Thee, O Adonai, my spirit, my soul and my bodies to be a holy and continual sacrifice unto Thee and to Thy Great Work. Amen.3... 

They had exchanged places now, and she was in the west and he in the east.. .. As he came into the east, the place of the priest, a change came over him it seemed as if the different levels of his consciousness all came into focus together, and were united, so that the past lived again in his soul and the future came into view he was the sacerdotal outcast he had been, and the great adept he would be, and the adept was built upon the outcast.. .. 

The world of dreams and the wake-world met on that threshold, and he knew now the secret of passing over. For in the great moments of life we cross the threshold in a kind of trance that has been described by those who have known it as a lesser death— when St. Theresa swooned in the Divine Union, when Keats first looked into Chapman s Homer. . . they knew that lesser death and its illuminations. Whoso has never experienced this flux of the soul in some transcendent experience lacks the key to Life.8... 

Maybe we ask post-9/11 -related questions because of who we are, what we are, and what we are not. That is, because we are Americans we are free, uninhibited thinkers who think what we say and say what we think—isn t America great Most Americans are soft-hearted and sympathetic to those in need—compassion is the very nature and soul of being American. Americans are not born terrorists they are not born into a terrorist regime they are not raised with fear in their hearts—they are not afraid every time they leave their homes and go about their daily business. Suicide bombers and other like terrorists are those that occupy some other faraway place, definitely not America, and they are definitely not American. Right ... 

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