The point in this discussion is not whether Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa was or was not a man of faith. The point is rather that it was almost natural for excellent minds to fall back upon pagan premises, since they were repelled by certain tenets of the Christianity they otherwise professed. We saw that one of these tenets was the immortality of the soul, which Pomponazzi denied philosophically but still professed as a Christian. The doctrine of the Incarnation was another hard-to-swallow tenet, as it necessitated a certain degree of anthropomorphization of God, which would limit him and deny his infinity. The importance of faith as the cornerstone of religion was also distasteful because it blocked the free movement of reason, and of science in particular.

What we have called the pagan thrust is the ambition of many thinkers, past and present, to remove these obstructions and to formulate a natural religion, as it came to be called. And where is this natural religion to be found ready-made if not in pagan antiquity, where the sages had repudiated the Homeric pantheon, relegated the gods to a position of inaction and indifference, and endowed the natural forces with philosophical tags so that there could be no question of faith in an impersonal cosmos?

The success of the pagan revival was stupendous, whether in the studies of the occult or of wisdom. We must look for the root of this success in the relentless efforts of so many thinkers not only to unearth ancient writings but also to formulate arguments against the Christian religion. Pagan speculation itself was supported by prestigious doctrines of the Orient, which display a spectacular and attractive variety of arguments grounded in pantheism, Gnosticism, and atomism. These Eastern doctrines are not just philosophies: they are worldviews, speculative but also lived visions --- religions, ethics, and epistemology in one. This makes them full-fledged rivals of Christianity.

 In analytical psychology, reality is ordered by a paradoxical movement of archetypal polarities. Individuation is the process by which these polarities are integrated. In this process, the ego, the center of awareness, differentiates from the Self -the center of wholeness- and reintegrates with the Self over the course of the life history. Jung maintains that it is in mid-life that we are mature enough to take on the arduous task of integrating the negative and contrasexual opposites of the personality.

The definition of the Japanese words wabi sabi has changed over the years. At one time when the Japanese language was young, wabi meant "poverty," and sabi meant "loneliness." During the first major flowering of Japanese culture, "wabi" came to refer to the ideal hermit's life, lived in contemplation of nature and appreciation of the spiritual and aesthetic values underlying a solitary existence. His was a wabi way. The Japanese tea masters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries developed a wabi style of tea ceremony as an alternative to the ornate and ostentatious ceremony in which the aristocracy would show off their valuable tea objects and forge political alliances. "Sabi" was refined over the years to emphasize a state of receptivity, fostered in remote natural settings. This positive aloneness was joined to the wabi appreciation of the understated and unrefined to form a phrase with deep resonance for the contemplative mind. People would dream of living in simple enlightened appreciation of nature.

Wabi sabi acknowledges three things: "nothing is perfect, nothing lasts, and nothing is finished." So, at first glance, it seems to celebrate the very thing that causes suffering. Yet, Basho found that wabi sabi led to enlightenment. So what is going on here? Basho himself studied Zen for several years and traveled in disguise as a Zen priest, yet he clearly became attached to people and places, wept openly beside ancient battlegrounds and other sites of romance or valor. He suffered gladly the pains of attachment and sympathy, identified with nature and its pathos. Either he was not very disciplined in his Buddhist practice, or he understood something about attachment and loss that we could do well to learn.

What you have made me see," answered the Lady, "is as plain as the sky, but I never saw it before. Yet it has happened every day. One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in one's mind. Then, it may be, one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is given. But this I had never noticed before - that the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished, if it were possible to wish - you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other."

The test of healthy religion, then, is its ability to assimilate the psychic antithesis of good and evil in the imago Dei and in human nature. Christianity's paradox is that the one who embodies the wholeness of God becomes the victim of humanity's dark side. In redeeming humanity, the unblemished goodness of Christ shows up humanity's dark side. But, according to Jung, since Christ is fully human and fully divine, Christians should acknowledge the polarities of good and evil in the Christ archetype. Instead, Christians have spiritualized Christ and excluded the instinctual, bodily aspects of Christ from the Christ image.

According to Hebblethwaite, the genius of Christian faith is its proclamation that nothing is beyond redemption. The gospel is not about integration of opposites but about their transformation and redemption.

In summary, Jung's emphasis on archetypal wholeness leaves us in search of the hidden God (deus absconditus) in the psyche and nature?' The either-or paradoxes of the moral life are sublated to the both-and paradoxes of archetypal wholeness. This leaves a serious lacuna in the formation of Christian faith and identity. The cross of Christ is "an icon of paradox."" It embraces both-and and either-or. It symbolizes God's identifying with the weak and bringing strength from weakness. Christ, in his crucifixion, fully embraced the darkness of sin and evil but in his resurrection gave to humanity a clear choice of new life over death, the profundity of which Nicodemus could not comprehend (John 3: 1 - 10). The either-or paradox of good and evil impressed upon us by the resurrected Christ places moral choice at the center of our becoming formed in the image of Christ. The eschatological hope is that in the end all humanity will choose the new life given by Christ. Until then, the Christ image will reflect a perfected creation or wholeness that is yet to come.

 The original god of Israel was El. This reconstruction may be inferred from two pieces of information. First, the name of Israel is not a Yahwistic name with the divine element of Yahweh, but an EI name, with the element, "el." This fact would suggest that EI was the original chief god of the group named Israel. Second Genesis 49:24-25 presents a series of EI epithets seperate from the mention of Yehweh in verse 18...Similarly, Deuteronomy 32:8-9 casts Yahweh in the role of one of the sons of El, here called elyon.

It may surprise some of us to hear that the first generation of Friends did not have a testimony for simplicity. They came upon a faith which cut to the root of the way they saw life, radically reorienting it. They saw that all they did must flow directly from what they experienced as true, and that if it did not, both the knowing and the doing became false. In order to keep the knowledge clear and the doing true, they stripped away anything which seemed to get in the way. They called those things superfluities, and it is this radical process of stripping for clear-seeing which we now term simplicity. - Frances Irene Tober, 1985