The Left Hand of God: A Biography of the Holy Spirit - Hardcover

Holl, Adolf

 
9780385492843: The Left Hand of God: A Biography of the Holy Spirit
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385492847 ISBN 13: 9780385492843
Verlag: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1998

Inhaltsangabe

Originally published in Germany, an imaginative, wide-ranging exploration of the history of the Holy Spirit traces its influence on the founders of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, as well as modern-day authors, psychologists, and religious leaders.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Adolf Holl lives in Vienna, where he was Chaplain of the University of Vienna and a lecturer in its Department of Catholic Theology.  Because of conflicts with Church authorities, he was suspended from his teaching and priestly duties.  He is the author of more than twenty books, including Jesus in Bad Company, Death and the Devil, and The Last Christian: A Biography of St. Francis of Assisi.

Aus dem Klappentext

divine biography examines the life of the Holy Spirit in the context of the history of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Interweaving scholarship with religion, myth, and culture, Holl expertly traces the influence of the Holy Spirit on men and women from all walks of life, over the course of centuries. The result is quite unlike anything written before.

The Holy Spirit inspired a few Galilean fishermen to find the courage to preach a new world religion. The Jews recognized it as the breath of God. Mohammed was inspired by it in the dictation of the Koran. Yet this same spirit has moved individuals to rebel against convention, authority, and even sanity. Through Holl's freewheeling yet always crystal-clear discourse, we see how the Holy Spirit informs an incredible array of beliefs (including those underlying the rituals of Appalachian snake handlers) and ideas (the works of Freud and James Joyce are among the many discuss

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Women's Friend

During the Second World War, the French writer Simone Weil died of malnutrition. Her medieval foremothers, who were, according to circumstances, vilified as witches, honored as saints, or regarded as madwomen, experienced their accesses of grace so intensely that they frequently forgot to eat. This sisterhood, in its happiest moments, became immersed in the divine Spirit like tears in the ocean.


But No, But No, She Said

She was so fair, she was so fair. No fairer maiden could be found, not anywhere on Polish ground. But no, but no, she said, not this; I never kiss.

In this soldiers' song about a Polish girl, male desire encounters a female refusal, and the less the young woman is prepared to change her mind, the more delightful she becomes. As they sing, the marching troops grow familiar with images that urge them to rape. Deeds that are taboo in peacetime go unpunished in war. The troops have long ago grasped the notion that relations between the sexes are equivalent to war. In this age-old order of things, the Polish girl really doesn't have a chance.

I never kiss. Unexpectedly, as though emerging out of fog--their outlines are still blurred--certain female forms enter the history of couples and their relations. These are girls who say no, and they're made of sterner stuff than the Polish maiden of the soldiers' fantasy. They are women whose daily bread doesn't come from the bakery. They speak, down through the centuries, with a single voice.

Like this, for example:

He came into my room and said, You poor wretch, you understand nothing. Come with me and I shall teach you some things you haven't even an inkling of. I followed him. He led me into a church. It was new and ugly. He walked me up to the altar and told me, Kneel down. I said to him, I haven't been baptized. He said, Fall on your knees with love before this place as though before the place where truth is. I obeyed. He had me leave the church and climb up to an attic room with an open window from which one could see the whole city, a few wooden scaffolds, the river where ships were unloaded. He told me to sit down. We were alone. He talked. Sometimes someone would come in, join the conversation, and then leave. It wasn't winter anymore. It wasn't yet spring. The branches of the trees were bare, without buds, and the air was cold and full of sunlight. The light brightened, grew radiant, faded, then the stars and the moon came in through the window. Then the dawn brightened again. Sometimes he stopped talking, went to the cupboard and took out a loaf of bread, and we shared it. This bread truly had the taste of bread. I've never found that taste again. He poured me and himself some wine that tasted like the sun and like the earth on which this city is built. Sometimes we stretched out on the floor of the attic room, and the sweetness of sleep descended upon me. Then I woke up again and drank the sunlight. He had promised to teach me something, but he taught me nothing. We chatted about all sorts of things, in a general way, as old friends do. One day he told me, Now go. I fell on my knees, I embraced his legs, I begged him not to send me away. But he threw me onto the stairs. I went down them without knowing anything, my heart seemed to be in pieces. I walked through the streets. Then I realized that I didn't have any idea where that house was. I never tried to find it again. I understood that he had come looking for me by mistake. My place is not in that attic room. Sometimes I can't stop myself from repeating, with fear and remorse, a little of what he told me. How can I know if I remember correctly? He isn't there to tell me so. I know well that he doesn't love me. How could he love me? And yet deep inside me something, some part of me, trembles with fear and can't stop thinking that maybe, in spite of everything, he loves me.

Simone Weil (1909-1943), a teacher in a secondary school, wanted to use the above text as the prologue to a book she was planning. As it turned out, the publication of her writings began only after her death, and since 1988 several volumes of a planned sixteen-volume collection of her works have appeared. She looks out quite cheerfully upon the world from the few photographs of her that exist. But appearances are deceiving. There were the chronic headaches, there was the chronic problem of money. And always, the sensation of hunger. A note on Simone Weil's death certificate reads: "cardial failure due to degeneration of the heart muscles due to starvation and pulmonary tuberculosis."


Self-starvation, practiced by young women until their bodies are fatally exhausted, is called anorexia nervosa, "nervous loss of appetite," by medical science, which in this case is fairly helpless. In the fall of 1906, the French neurologist Pierre Janet was invited by the Harvard Medical School to give a series of lectures, in one of which the eminent psychiatrist discussed anorexia. In the first stage, Janet observed, a girl complains about vague stomach pains and takes her medicine willingly. Next, when the medicine doesn't work and her parents are getting exasperated, she vomits whatever she has been induced to swallow. This stage can last ten years and includes hyperactivity on the part of the patient. Finally, according to Janet, the girl has little urine and is constantly constipated, her breath is foul, her skin dry and cracked; her pulse quickens; she is bedridden and now delirious. At the last minute, some girls realize what is happening to them, yield to the authority of their doctors, and recover. The others die.

Physicians treating the disease were struck by the remarkable euphoria their patients displayed during the second and longest phase of the disease. Janet compared this elevated mood with the state of consciousness reached by ecstatic saints. Anorexia, the lecturer concluded, is to be traced back to much deeper sources than was supposed.

The comparison with the female ecstatics was not chosen at random. Since 1896, ten years before his journey to America, Janet had been treating a woman who gave her name as "Scapegoat" (le bouc), because she had to atone for the sins of the world. In the photographs that Janet made of his patient, one could see a petite, pretty person wearing light sandals, standing on tiptoe, and lifting her skirt a little, as if to show off her shapely legs. From time to time, the stigmata of the Crucified appeared on her body, twice in 1896, five times in 1897, ten times in 1899. The wounds would be bandaged and allowed to heal, but then they would reappear in the same places, usually just before the onset of her period. Once a day, the patient had to be compelled to eat at least a small piece of bread and to drink some milk. Even this modest nourishment was skipped when the woman went into ecstasy, which lasted for two or three days.

Janet discharged his patient from the Salpêtrière sanatorium in Paris after a stay of six and a half years. She was then forty-seven years old. After her death in 1921, Janet began to write a two-volume account of her story, under the title From Anxiety to Ecstasy. In studying his patient, the neurologist was unable to detect very much more than a vague connection between her refusal to take nourishment and her propensity to go into ecstasies. Her ecstasies, Janet wrote, exhibit the essential characteristics of all the ecstasies of genuine mystics. Apparently Madeleine, as Janet called his patient, had come into the world at the wrong time. Her true place was in the Middle Ages. Medieval mysticism is without significance today, declared the professor.

Who knows. The refusal of women to take nourishment is not an invention of contemporary prima ballerinas and models. It can be traced to the Middle Ages, all the way back...

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Verlag
Bantam Doubleday Dell
Erscheinungsdatum
1998
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385492847
ISBN 13 
9780385492843
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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