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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2022
We began in the last chapter with a puzzle about how men and women with everything, wealth, position, good looks, and love – would leave everything for an austere life dedicated to God. I have suggested that it is the eternal, timeless, transcendent God that appears to fill the gaping hole left when our deepest desires encounter the world. This may be true enough, but it is very incomplete. The philosophical vocations of the Hellenistic and Roman eras also sought out eternity and transcendence. Yet their stories have quite a different flavor. One might seek tranquility in the face of inevitable death, as the Epicureans did; or unity with a cosmic source of wisdom, as the Stoics did; or a prophetic rejection of human pretense, as Diogenes the Cynic did. The Christian God is transcendent, but also lives intimately with us. Intimacy with a transcendent and timeless God is a difficult thing to understand or to articulate. Yet we must try, since the religious we have described are evidently acting on a passionate, personal love, as befits a personal God.
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