26 August 2009

The antichrist

The "kingdom of heaven" is a state of the heart--not something to come "beyond the world" or "after death." The whole idea of natural death is absent from the Gospels: death is not a bridge, not a passing; it is absent because it belongs to a quite different, a merely apparent world, useful only as a symbol. The "hour of death" isnot a Christian idea--"hours," time, the physical life and its crises have no existence for the bearer of "glad tidings." . . .

The "kingdom of God" is not something that men wait for: it had no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it is not going to come at a "millennium"--it is an experience of the heart, it is everywhere and it is nowhere. . . .

This book is mystifying, horrible, inexcusable, and brilliant. I've never read anything that requires so much of me from sentence to sentence in terms of evaluation. You have to constantly sifting through it. It's a challenge, the best sort of challenge.