A Wayfarer's Faith: Aspects of the common basis of religious life — John Shaqi
A Wayfarer's Faith: Aspects of the common basis of religious lifeHarvey, T. Edmund (Thomas Edmund)
Religion
A Wayfarer's Faith: Aspects of the common basis of religious life
Harvey, T. Edmund (Thomas Edmund)
Society of Friends -- Doctrines
Then realizing the vastness of truth, and the limitations of our own
powers of apprehending it, we must be willing to recognize that there
must be other aspects of truth which we, as individuals or as a
religious community, have not yet apprehended, and that the whole truth
must needs be too great for any human mind or system to express. This
attitude of mind should surely be perfectly compatible with an
enthusiastic loyalty to that vision of the truth which has been given to
us or our community, and with a desire to share this vision with others.
[p.10]
To attempt to surrender our own expression of the Truth as we see it,
and replace it by an expression drawn from the vision of others is to
make in the inner life an error like that of the school of Bologna in
painting. The Caracci and their followers deliberately aimed at
acquiring the peculiar excellencies of each of the great masters who
preceded them, the harmonies of Raphael, the colour of Titian, the
vigour and the grandiose forms of Michael Angelo. They hoped to combine
all these and thus achieve a higher perfection than their masters, but
in so doing they failed to express themselves in their own way, for they
were always painting things as they imagined they ought to see them, and
not as they really saw them.
The great artist, like Rembrandt, will honour and admire a Raphael or a
Correggio without seeking to imitate them or to borrow their technique.
And so while we recognise the vision of truth that comes to men of
different views from our own, we must not abandon our own vision, or our
attempt to express it faithfully, because we know that we see a part and
not the whole.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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