On Bill Moyers
Socratic Dialogue That Set Me Afire and I Burn Still 40 Years Later
RIP Bill Moyers. His conversations with Joseph Campbell came very close to drawing me off to graduate school to study mythology and set me on fire. Today, 40 years later, I'm still burning. The relentless nudging and questioning and listening and arriving at new revelations and new questions felt like contemporary Socratic dialogue. He had a way to draw out and open up vistas and ideas and curiosity that were unlike anyone else working in the public realm before or since. I didn't follow that path formally, but I remain firmly upon it to this day. It is one of the blessings of cancer to have found the time and space to fully become re-enthralled with its familiar landscape and weather and silence and the bells ringing in my ears. Thanks Bill and thanks Joseph.
This thread from Reddit represents my curiosity and pursuit of connections from the macro to the micro to the personal and in that “center is everywhere, but circumference is nowhere” way which may seem strange for someone who was born an atheist. (To be clear, I did not assemble these quotes, but this looks and feels like something I would do.)
“Why is the concept of God often associated with the Circle or the Sphere?
List of quotes from here:
1. "The substance of God is spherical, in no way resembling man. He is all eye and all ear, but does not breathe; he is the totality of mind and thought, and is eternal." -- Diogenes Laertius, talking about what Xenophanes believed in Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Xenophanes lived 570-478 BC. Although Xenophanes is generally believed the first to talk about God as a sphere, the idea may go back even further: "It is said that [Musaeus], the son of Eumolpus, was the first to compose a genealogy of the gods and to construct a sphere, and that he maintained that all things proceed from unity and are resolved again into unity." -- Diogenes Laertius, talking about Musaeus in Lives of Eminent Philosophers. It is unknown when Musaeus lived, maybe 700 BC or older.
2. "Empedocles quoque sic Deum diffinire fertur: Deus est sphaera cujus centraum ubique, qcircumferentia nusquam." ("Empedocles defined God as follows: 'God is a sphere whose center is everywhere, circumference nowhere.'") Vincent de Beauvais, Speculum historiale (ca. 1190-1264). This is the first clear reference to the idea, but it is not yet clear where Beauvais got this quote. I first found reference to this quote in Nietzsche and a Platonist Tradition of the Cosmos: Center Everywhere and Circumference Nowhere by Robin Small. Empedocles lived c. 494-434 BC
3. "...a few years after he died, the Sicilian Empedocles of Agrigentum plotted a laborious cosmogony, in one section of which the particles of earth, air, fire, and water compose an endless sphere, 'the round Sphairos, which rejoices in its circular solitude.'" -- Jorge Luis Borges, Pascal's Sphere. Also quoted by Borges, but missing the "infinite" aspect, is Parmenides: "Being is like the mass of a well-rounded sphere, whose force is constant from the center in any direction." -- Parmenides of Elea. Parmenides lived around 515 BC, but only a few fragments of his writings exist, so speculation is heavy with this one. On a related note, Permenides is known to be the oldest reference to the sphericity of the earth.
4. "The soul is not a circle in the sense of the geometric figure but in that it at once contains the Primal Nature as centre and is contained by it as circumference [... We] hold through our own centre to the centre of all the centres, just as the centres of the great circles of a sphere coincide with that of the sphere to which all belong." -- Plotinus, 3rd Century
5. (The following quote is regarding examples of the close relationship between Plotinus' ideas and Marius Victorinus (4th Century). Victorinus is believed by some to be the original author of the 'infinite sphere' phrase): "I shall mention only one, the geometrical comparison of centre and sphere of which Plotinus is so fond and which appears at least twice in the Adversus Arium -- applied to the Trinity first in its inner life (i. 6), and then in its relation to the world at large. The point or centre gives birth, as it were, to both line (radius) and sphere. Victorinus insists that we should imagine a tridimensional and ever-moving sphere rather than a flat motionless circumference. The centre (i.e. the Father), having no dimensions, is perfectly still, but dynamically present in each moment and movement of the line and sphere which it generates and which revolve around it (Son and Spirit are magis motus); the centre is thus to some extent the whole sphere. Around this divine reality revolves the cosmos, which is not a perfect sphere but some approximate imitation." -- Henry, P. (1950). “The Adversus Arium of Marius Victorinus, The First Systematic Exposition of the Doctrine of the Trinity”. The Journal of Theological Studies
6. "God is everywhere and nowhere in space." (In this quote, although there is no reference to the sphere, the description contains the essential paradox, and Emerson later attributes the sphere to Augustine as well, although apparently mistakenly.) -- Augustine, Confessions, 354-430 A.D.
7. "God is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere." -- Hermes Trismegistus or possibly Aristotle, Book of the 24 Philosophers, 12th Century. Marius Victorinus is believed by some to be the author of this book.
8. "God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere." -- Alain of Lille, 12th Century
9. "But it is true without fail that she whose womb swelled understood more than Plato, for she knew from the time that she bore Him and rejoiced in doing so, that He was the wondrous sphere that can have no end, that shoots its center through every place and whose circumference has no fixed place. She knew that He was the wondrous triangle whose unity creates three angles, but whose three angles make only one whole. He is the triangular circle, the circular triangle who harbored in the virgin. Plato did not know as much as that; he did not see that the triple unity in this simple trinity, the sovereign deity clothed in a human skin, is God who is called Creator." -- The Romance of the Rose, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, 1230-1275
10. "With his whole being God is present whole and entire as much in the least thing as in the greatest. Thus the just person who loves God in all things would seek in vain for something more or greater when he has some little thing in which the God whom he loves alone to the exclusion of everything else is totally present. There is no 'greater' or 'less' in God nor in the One; they are below and outside God and the One. And thus someone who sees, seeks, and loves what is more or less is not as such divine. This is the meaning of the axiom in the Book of Twenty-Four Philosophers: 'God is the infinite intellectual sphere with as many circumferences as centers and whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. He is entire in his least part.'" -- Meister Eckhart (1260-1328), Commentary on Exodus n. 91, Chapter t6, verse 18 (LWII 94, a7-95); translated in Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, ed. and trans. Bernard McGinn with the collaboration of Frank Tobin
11. "In its depths I saw internalized, bound with love in one volume, what through the universe becomes unsewn quires: substances and accidents and their modes as it were conflated together, in such away that what I describe is a simple light... In that Light one becomes such that it is impossible ever to consent to turn away from it toward any other sight, because goodness, the object of the will, is all gathered there, and what is perfect there falls short elsewhere... In the profound and clear Subsistence of the deep Light I saw three circles, of three colors and of one circumference, and one seemed refected from the other like a rainbow from a rainbow, and the third seemed fire breathing equally from both." -- Dante, Paradiso, Canto 33, 1300
12. "By God's power, presence, and essence, God is the One whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. God exists uncircumscribed in everything. God is, therefore, all inclusive. God is the essence of everything. God is most perfect and immense: within all things, but not enclosed; outside all things, but not excluded; above all things, but not aloof; below all things, but not debased. Finally, therefore, this God is all in all…. Consequently, from him, through him and in him, all things exist." -- St. Bonaventure, 13th Century
13. "God is an infinite circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere." -- Nicholas of Cusa (1401 – 1464)
14. "Thus God is the center of all, because He is so in all things that He is more internal to each thing than it is to itself. He is also the world's circumference because, in existing outside all things, He so transcends all things that His dignity immeasurably excels the highest summit of each thing. Again, He is greatest of all in power to the extent He is least of all in quantity, if this is permissable way of putting it. As He is the center, He is in all, but as the circumference, He is outside all; in all, but not included because He is also the circumference; outside all too but not excluded because He is also the center. So what is God? One might call Him a spiritual circle whose center is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere." -- Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology, XVII, 3. 15th Century
15. "Now, my friends, you may depart, and may that intellectual sphere whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere, whom we call GOD, keep you in his almighty protection." -- Gargantua and Pantagruel, Francois Rabelais, 16th Century
16. "Our soul delighteth to disport itself and is well pleased in that frolic to take a review of its native country, which is the heavens, where it receiveth a most notable participation of its first beginning with an imbuement from its divine source, and in contemplation of that infinite and intellectual sphere, whereof the centre is everywhere, and the circumference in no place of the universal world, to wit, God." -- Gargantua and Pantagruel, by Francois Rabelais, 16th Century
17. "We can state with certainty that the universe is all center, or that the center of the universe is everywhere and the circumference nowhere." -- Giordano Bruno, 1584
18. "The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature. No idea approaches it. We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. In short, it is the greatest sensible mark of the almighty power of God that imagination loses itself in that thought." -- Pascal, 1600s
19. "We naturally think ourselves much more capable of reaching the center of for the visible expanse of the things than of grasping their circumference, world visibly surpasses us; but since it is we who surpass smaller things, we believe ourselves more capable of possessing them. Yet just as great a capacity is needed for reaching the Nothing as the Everything; it must be infinite for both of them, and it seems to me that anyone who had grasped the final principles of things would also have managed to reach the infinite. The one depends on the other, and the one leads to the other. These extremes meet and reunite with each other just because of their distance apart; they rediscover each other in God and in God alone." -- Pascal, Pensees, 129.
20. "O God, thou art an intelligible sphere, whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere but in thyself." -- Joseph Hall, sermon, 1600s
21. "God is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere." The Blessed and Boundless God, George Swinnock, 1600s
22. "Let him ask Truth herself where she is.... She will tell him, that if he climb into heaven she is there, and that if he go down to hell, she is there also. And that if he take the wings of the morning, and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there also he shall meet with her, and can never go out of her sphere, whose center is every where, and whose circumference is no where." -- John Norris, An Essay towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World, (London, 1701)
23. "God is that Sacred Circle of All-Being, of Infiniteness, of Eternity, whose Center is everywhere, in the smallest Point of Things; whose Circumference is no where bounded." -- Peter Sterry, The Appearance of God to Man, 1710
24. "Properly speaking, a mystery is an obviously absurd dogma which nevertheless conceals within itself a sublime truth . . . for example when Pascal, who was at the same time pietist, mathematician, and philosopher, says in this threefold capacity that God is everywhere center and nowhere periphery." -- Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, II, 334 (Sect. 174), 1851
25. "The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Circles, 1841
26. "You are a wheel whose substance alone exists, the diameter of the circle without circumference creating a plane by its rotation around its median point. The substance of your diameter is a Point." -- Alfred Jarry, 1869
27. "God is the tangential point between zero and infinity." –- Alfred Jarry, 1898.
28. "O Zarathustra... to those who think as we do, all things themselves are dancing: they come and offer their hands and laugh and flee and come back. Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same house is being built. Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself. In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity." -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a Book for All and None (1884)
29. "Every center of force has a perspective towards the entire remainder, i.e. its own particular valuation, mode of action, and mode of resistance. The 'apparent world', therefore, is reduced to a specific mode of action on the world, emanating from a center. Now there is no other mode of action whatever; and the 'world' is only a word for the totality of these actions." -- Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 305 (Sect. 567). (Couple this quote with the preceding one by Nietzsche for a more complete idea of what he's saying.)
30. "The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any hexagon and whose circumference is unattainable." -- Jorge Luis Borges, 20th Century
31. "God is an intelligible sphere -- a sphere known to mind, not to the senses -- whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere." -- Joseph Campbell, Power of Myth, 20th Century
32. "'God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.' So we are told in a little twelfth-century book known as The Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers. Each of us -- whoever and wherever he may be -- is then the center, and within him, whether he knows it or not, is that Mind at Large, the laws of which are the laws not only of all minds but of all space as well." -- Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By (p. 274)
33. "The center of the world is the axis mundi, the central point the pole around which all revolves. The central point of the world is the point where stillness and movement are together. Movement is time, but stillness is eternity. Realizing how this moment of your life is actually a moment of eternity, and the experiencing the eternal aspect of what you’re doing in the experiences -- this the mythological experience.” -- Joseph Campbell, Power of Myth, 20th Century. (related to the preceding entry)
34. "I had a feeling once about Mathematics, that I saw it all -- Depth beyond depth was revealed to me -- the Byss and the Abyss. I saw, as one might see the transit of Venus -- or even the Lord Mayor's Show, a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly how it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable: and how the one step involved all the others. It was like politics. But it was after dinner and I let it go!" -- Winston Churchill, My Early Life, 1930
35. "At the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit. And that center is really everywhere. It is within each of us." -- Black Elk, 20th Century
36. "And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy." -- Black Elk, 20th Century
37. "Pascal said that God is a circle, of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere. But how is one to imagine a circle apart from its circumference? The Zohar adopts the antithesis of this paradoxical image and in respect of the circle of Pascal would say rather that the circumference is everywhere, while that which is nowhere is the center." -- Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of all Ages, 20th Century"
https://www.reddit.com/r/religion/comments/x3bhcl/why_is_the_concept_of_god_often_associated_with/