The Philosophy of Courage - Alcoholics Anonymous. AA, Meeting ...

yond! The Beyond is here! Its miracle is here, is everywhere! ... Where before everythingwas vagueness, uncertainty and perplexity, everything is now clarity, certainty,simplicity. Where there was drifting, now there is direction ... Where there was ...staleness and routine, there is now newness and magic.” [chapter 2, section V]Suddenly he could see the presence of God shining forth in some strange fashionin the trees and flowers, and hills and skies, and all the world around him. In mybook Images of Christ, I refer to this as “nature mysticism,” a way of feeling God’s numinousreality which was a recurrent motif in the Romantic tradition in literature. 11Philip Leon modifies a famous stanza from the English romantic poet Wordsworth’sOde on Intimations of Immortality to describe this spiritual experience.There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,The earth, and every common sight,To me did seemApparelled in celestial lightThe glory and the freshness of a dream.In 1917, the German theologian Rudolf Otto gave a detailed philosophicalaccount of how we can apprehend God in this way, in a book which is still one ofthe truly great theological classics, The Idea of the Holy. Otto was a Kantian, just likeLeon, but used a different strategy for describing the human mind’s contact withGod and the realm of the sacred: after toying (in an earlier book) with the theorythat we became aware of God’s presence at the level of the Absolute and the Unlimited,Otto argued in The Idea of the Holy that the numinous sense of the holy orsacred was instead one of the basic categories of the human understanding. 12Coming to see the Truth in all religions, as wellas the falling short of all religious systemsIn this kind of spiritual experience, Philip Leon said, he came to see the Lightof Truth shining forth in all the religions and philosophies of the world. He gaineda new understanding of the doctrines taught by Judaism, Islam, ancient Greco-Roman paganism, and all the many varieties of Christianity. He was also able forthe first time to recognize the truly profound discoveries made by philosophers likePlato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. But he did not mean by this that everything all ofthose systems said was true, or that any of those religions and philosophies had thewhole truth. He was able to see where each of these religions and philosophies hadvalid things to say, but also where each of them fell short of the full truth, or evendenied an important measure of the truth.20