Essay 2 — Where the narrowing began, and where it leads
Steve Sagnotti · steves-head.space
‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.’
— 1 Corinthians 13:12
Star trails over Nevada campground.
The previous essay asked what the narrowing built. This one asks where it started.
The architecture was three thousand years in the making. From the moment the shared inheritance of the steppe peoples diverged — one path following the divine inward, the other externalizing it until a distance opened that required professional management — the direction was being set. The Greek polis made mortality a civic condition. Rome made the sky-father a magistrate. Each step built on the last. By the time the councils met, the cage was already standing. What the councils did was crystallize it — lock it into creed and canon and condemnation in a sequence running from Nicaea in 325 to Constantinople II in 553, setting the framework for the Western understanding of what a human being is for the next sixteen hundred years.
Not conspiracy. Just the ordinary logic of people in rooms sharing a common interest in the outcome.
— — —
I. The Steppes
Eurasia, 4500–2500 BCE — The world before the gate
Before the gate, there was a sky with no boundary. Before the institution, there was a tradition no institution could own.
Before the councils, before the crusades, before the city-state and the emperor and the pope, there were the steppes.
The ancestor culture that eventually seeded the languages and mythologies of Greece, Rome, Persia, and India lived as pastoral nomads across the Eurasian grasslands. They left no written record. What they left is stranger and more durable: a set of linguistic fossils embedded in every language their descendants would eventually speak.
At the center of their world was the Sky Father. Not a god in the later Western sense. Not a being in a palace above the clouds. The sky. The actual, physical, all-encompassing sky — present everywhere it touched the earth, which was everywhere. Sacred and profane had no boundary because the sky drew no boundary. Consciousness, nature, and divinity were a single fabric.
The linguistic traces survive in plain sight. The Sky Father becomes Zeus Pater in Greek, Dyaus Pitr in Sanskrit, Iuppiter in Latin. Every branch of the Indo-European family carries the same root: the bright, shining daylight sky as father, as source, as the ground of everything. It is not a coincidence. It is an inheritance — the same word, and the same felt relationship to the sky, carried across thousands of miles and thousands of years. These are not borrowings from one another. They are the same word surviving in three branches of the same family, which means the felt relationship they carried was already ancient before any of them were written down.
The tradition was oral, fluid, varying by tribe and region. The divine was the medium through which everything moved. You could not be separated from it because separation would require a boundary, and the sky has no boundary. No institution can own what cannot be fixed in writing. No gatekeeper can manage access to what is already everywhere.
The scholar of comparative religion Mircea Eliade described what this felt like from the inside as ‘sacred time’ — the sense of living in the eternal present, of participating in a cosmos that was alive and accessible at every moment. Not a transaction with a distant deity. Participation in an ongoing, living whole.
What the Western tradition eventually installed in its place was linear time: history moving in one direction, from creation to judgment, with the individual soul granted a single window to get it right. The distance between those two ways of inhabiting the world is the distance this essay traces.
— — —
II. The Divergence
India and Greece, 1500–500 BCE — The same source, two entirely different conclusions
The same inheritance. Two migrations. Two entirely different understandings of what the Sky Father meant — one followed his implications inward, the other pushed him outward and upward until a distance opened that required professional management.
When the steppe peoples migrated outward — south into Persia and India, west into Greece and eventually Rome — they carried the Sky Father with them. And then they did two entirely different things with him.
In the East, thinkers followed an inference. If the sky-father permeates everything, and if humanity is part of everything, then the divine is not somewhere else — it is accessible from within. The sky-father faded from the earliest Indian texts, not because he was abandoned but because his implications were followed inward. By roughly 800 to 500 BCE, Indian philosophy had arrived somewhere surprising: the consciousness underlying all existence and the individual self are not separate. The sky-father didn’t move to a throne. He dissolved into the nature of everything, including the nature of the person looking. The path is interior. No institution stands between the soul and its source.
In the West, something different happened. The same sky-father got progressively localized, personified, externalized. He became Zeus — a character with a biography, a throne on a mountain, and a fondness for intervening in human affairs in colorful and often problematic ways. The sky became a location. The divine became a being above the world rather than the nature of the world. And the moment the divine became a being above the world, a distance opened between mortal and immortal.
That distance is what the priest exists to cross on your behalf.
This is the motion that runs through the entire Western story. As the divine rises and externalizes, the human shrinks in proportion. The steppe nomad moves inside a living cosmos — co-extensive with the sacred, a participant in a fabric that has no edge. The Greek mortal is defined by finitude: a temporary tenant in a city owned by the gods, permitted one life to establish their worth. The Christian sinner requiring absolution is the completion of that same motion. Not three separate theological positions. The same withdrawal, continued across three thousand years, the space between human and divine steadily filled by institutions offering to manage the distance for a fee.
The teaching that would become the institution’s most cited text knew this. When asked when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus answered with a precision the Western tradition has spent two thousand years managing: ‘The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed… the kingdom of God is within you.’ (Luke 17:20–21.) The interior path, stated plainly — or nearly so. The Greek allows ‘within you’ or ‘among you,’ and the institutional tradition has long preferred the latter. But either reading points the same direction: the kingdom is present and accessible, not coming with signs, not requiring management. The mystics read ‘within.’ The councils read ‘among.’ The translation dispute is not philological. It is the mechanism, applied to a single verse — and it didn’t matter which side won. The irony was not lost on the mystics. It was largely invisible to the councils.
— — —
III. The Eastern Path
India, China, and the meeting point with Greece, 600–300 BCE — Three arrivals at the same place
Three independent traditions, no coordination, one conclusion: the ground of being has no gatekeeper. The interior path, by its nature, has no address to burn down.
While Greek philosophy was building its external architecture, three independent traditions — in India, in China, and in a reform movement within Indian religion — were arriving at the same territory from different directions. They did not coordinate. They reached the same conclusion anyway.
The Indian philosophical tradition, built over centuries of inquiry, arrived at its central declaration: the individual consciousness is not separate from the underlying consciousness of the cosmos. You are not a subject of the sky. You are a particular expression of it. The gate opens from inside.
In China, around the same era, Lao Tzu described what he called the Tao — ‘the source beneath all things, not empty but generative’ — in eighty-one short chapters that Western physics spent the twentieth century arriving at from the other direction. The Tao permeates everything. It is not a being with a throne. It is the nature of things. You cannot obstruct it. You cannot own it. The tradition this produced was one of deliberate non-coercion: you work with the grain of things, not against them. The heavy hand on the tiller is precisely what the Tao identifies as the source of disorder — not its cure.
The third arrival was in India itself — but it came as explicit dissent, not independent convergence. The Buddha knew the tradition he was arguing against. He looked at the existing arrangement — a priestly caste holding a monopoly on divine access, with salvation available only through correct rituals performed by correct priests using correct texts — in a word, dogma — and refused it. Liberation, he said, is available to anyone, through direct practice, without intermediation. What he was refusing was not the insight. He was refusing the toll booth. His traditional last words, recorded in the Mahaparinibbana Sutta of the Pali canon: be a lamp unto yourself. Not be guided by the lamp of the institution. Your own lamp. The community he founded was a community of direct practitioners, not a hierarchy of gatekeepers.
Each of these traditions survived precisely because it could not be monopolized. You cannot burn the Tao. You cannot exile the awareness that is already inside you. You cannot build a wall around the practice of sitting quietly and watching what the mind does. The interior path, by its nature, has no address to burn down.
There is a moment when the Eastern and Western paths were in literal contact. When the Macedonian king Alexander reached what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan in the late fourth century BCE, the encounter left a visible record: statues of the Greek hero Hercules serving as bodyguard to the Buddha. The hero of the West, shield-bearer of the East. Artisans were already synthesizing the two traditions in stone. The exchange was real. The ideas were translatable. The turn was simply not taken — and without it, the two rivers kept running toward opposite seas.
— — —
IV. The Greek Turn
Greece, 800–400 BCE — Three decisions that built the Western cage
Writing fixed the gods. Walls defined the sacred. The city-state made mortality a legal status. Three steps, four centuries, one direction.
The Western divergence did not happen in a single moment. It happened in three steps, across roughly four centuries, each building on the last.
The first step: the myths were written down. Around the eighth century BCE, the oral, fluid, regionally varying stories of the Greek world were fixed in writing for the first time. This sounds like preservation. It was also transformation. Zeus became a character with a fixed biography and a consistent personality. The gods received assigned domains and defined relationships with humanity. The sky-father, who had been a felt presence everywhere the sky touched the earth, became a person on a mountain with a court and a temper. The historian of ancient philosophy Peter Kingsley has documented that earlier Greek thinkers were practicing something closer to interior mysticism — a direct experience of the ground of being — that later philosophers deliberately rationalized away. The standardization was not inevitable. The Greek turn was chosen, not accidental.
The second step: the sacred precinct. The Greek word for it — temenos — means ‘cut off.’ Once you designate where the divine is present, you simultaneously designate everywhere else as profane: outside the sacred boundary. The sky-father, who had been everywhere, is now managed in precincts. Nature is no longer a living body. It is a resource and a backdrop. The sacred is a walled space. This is the first institutional gateway — not yet a monopoly, but the first moment when the divine has an address.
The third step: the city-state. In the Greek polis, your identity was civic. The gods protected the city’s walls, not the nature of the cosmos. To be mortal was a legal status: a temporary occupant of a life assessed by standards you did not set. Civic immortality — living on through the memory of your fellow citizens — replaced any sense of cosmic continuity. One life. Meaningful only through its legibility to the state.
The philosopher Socrates was executed in 399 BCE on charges that included impiety and introducing new gods. What he had introduced was an interior divine voice — a felt sense of direct contact with something beyond the civic framework. The city-state could not survive that precedent. If the divine was interior and accessible to every citizen, the city’s gods were optional. Optional gods cannot be taxed. In the Vedic world, realizing your unity with the divine was the entire point of the practice. In the Greek city-state, claiming to hear a divine voice inside yourself was punishable by death.
A historian of Greek thought named E.R. Dodds traced the psychological texture of this shift: a move from a world where behavior was governed by external regard — what will others think — to one governed by a sense of being watched by an authority above. This is not a moral improvement. It is the divine being moved from the community and the cosmos into a position above both — watching, judging, requiring management. The individual, once embedded in the sacred fabric, now stands isolated beneath a surveillance it cannot see clearly and cannot reach directly. The diminishment and the externalization are the same motion.
— — —
V. The Roman Absorption
Rome, 300 BCE–400 CE — Philosophy almost reverses the direction. The state religion finishes it.
The Stoics came closest in the West to recovering the Eastern path. Rome turned the sky-father into a magistrate, a contract, a bureaucrat.
When Rome absorbed the Greek world, it absorbed the externalization along with everything else. Then it refined it.
One Roman philosophical school almost reversed the direction. The Stoics allegorized the gods — Zeus became the universal rational order immanent in all things — and in doing so recovered something close to the Eastern intuition: the divine as the nature of things, not a being above them. A freed slave named Epictetus became one of their most compelling voices, insisting that Stoic freedom was interior and absolute, unreachable by any external power. This is almost the Eastern path in Western dress. But the tell is in the phrase they coined: ‘citizen of the world.’ It expands the city-state to the cosmos without dismantling city-state logic. The walls become invisible rather than gone.
Rome itself organized religion on Roman terms. The sky-father became Jupiter Optimus Maximus — the Best and Greatest, bound by contract to protect Rome if Rome performed the correct rituals with exactness. When Rome wanted to declare war, priests invoked the sky-father to witness that the war was just. When the emperor Augustus took the title of Chief Priest, he fused the sky-father’s authority with the state’s coercive power. Sin shifted from the crime of claiming too much divine access to the crime of breaking the law. The divine was now a bureaucrat. The difference between a living sky and a divine bureaucrat is not theological. It is the difference between a cosmos you participate in and a system you navigate.
The last major Western philosopher to attempt a recovery of the interior path was a third-century Egyptian-Roman thinker named Plotinus. He stripped the divine of everything physical — no body, no location, no gender, no describable qualities at all. The absolute source from which everything else emanates as light from a sun, without effort, without intention, simply because fullness overflows. And, he insisted, it is accessible: through contemplation, through turning attention inward, union with the source is achievable. He called this final state ‘the flight of the alone to the alone.’
A generation later, the theologian Augustine took Plotinus’s architecture and called it God. He preserved the interior path for individuals — the soul can, in principle, ascend toward the divine — while making the institutional Church the necessary manager of that ascent. Interior access preserved in principle. Managed in practice.
What the philosophical schools never quite reached, the early Christian communities held directly. A collection of sayings attributed to Jesus — known as the Gospel of Thomas, circulating in Greek by around 140 CE — contained no narrative, no crucifixion, no resurrection. Only sayings. Among them: ‘The Kingdom of God is not in the sky, for the birds will get there before you… the Kingdom is within you and outside you.’ And: ‘I am the light that is over all things. Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.’ This is not a theology that requires a church. It is the divine as the nature of things, accessible wherever things are. The councils burned the theology. The question outlived them.
In 367 CE, a bishop in Alexandria issued an order for the destruction of all non-canonical texts. Someone at a monastery in Upper Egypt chose to bury a collection of texts — including the Gospel of Thomas — in a sealed jar in the desert hills near Nag Hammadi rather than burn them. They waited there for 1,578 years.
— — —
VI. The Thread Cut
Alexandria and Constantinople, 185–553 CE — The last internal argument, and the condemnation that ended it
Origen argued the soul’s journey was iterative and its destination assured. That argument made the institution’s leverage disappear — which is why it had to be buried with him.
The most intellectually formidable theologian of the early Church was a scholar from Alexandria named Origen, born around 185 CE. He was prolific, systematic, and committed to following the argument wherever it led. It led somewhere inconvenient.
In a treatise written around 225 CE, Origen argued that souls existed before birth. They were created as pure intellects, dwelling in the presence of God, and through a process of growing distracted they fell into matter — into bodies, into the physical world. The physical world, in this reading, is not a punishment. It is a school. God’s response to the fall of consciousness is not judgment but restoration. Every soul, across whatever ages and whatever iterations are necessary, will ultimately return to its source.
The implications were clear. If the soul’s journey is iterative and its destination is assured, the institution’s leverage disappears. You cannot hold the threat of eternal damnation over a soul guaranteed to find its way home. You cannot make the institution indispensable to a soul whose direct access to the divine is, in this framework, the premise of its existence.
More than twelve centuries later, a fourteenth-century English woman named Julian of Norwich sat alone in a small stone cell attached to the wall of a church and arrived, through direct contemplative experience, at the same place Origen had reached through argument. Her conclusion, written with careful precision: all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Not as piety. As report — from the inside of an experience. No intermediary. No institutional authorization required. The ground of being encountered directly and found to be, in her word, love.
She wrote in English, not Latin. She knew what she was doing. The Latin readers would not have let it pass. The interior path had not died. It had learned to be careful.
Origen was never condemned during his lifetime. He was too respected, too central to early Christian scholarship. His ideas accumulated on a list. In 553 CE, the Byzantine emperor convened a council in Constantinople. Among its actions: the posthumous condemnation of Origen, nearly three hundred years after his death. The pre-existence of souls was formally declared heresy. The soul’s iterative journey — the thread connecting Western Christianity to its own ancient roots, to the Indian traditions, to the direct practice the Buddha had said was available to anyone — was cut.
You do not condemn a man dead for three centuries unless what he said is still being said. The condemnation was not archaeological. It was operational. The ideas were still circulating, still threatening, still offering an alternative to the monopoly the institution required. The thread had to be cut because people kept picking it up.
The decree accomplished something precise. If the soul’s journey is iterative and its destination assured, the institution’s leverage over that soul disappears entirely. You cannot threaten with eternal damnation a soul guaranteed to find its way home. You cannot make yourself indispensable to a soul whose direct access to the divine is the premise of its existence. The one-life framework is not merely a theological position. It is the load-bearing wall of the institutional monopoly. Remove it and the building collapses. Whether or not Justinian and the bishops understood the arrangement in those terms, the emperor and the church each got what they needed from the same decree. Power does not require conspiracy. It only requires that the people in the room share a common interest in the outcome.
A note on transmission: Origen’s treatise survives primarily through a later Latin translation whose translator explicitly acknowledged he had ‘cleaned up’ the more radical positions to make them sound more orthodox. The sharpest edges are already filed down. What remains is still enough to get a man condemned three hundred years after his death.
— — —
VII. The Lens You’re Looking Through
Where we are now — The pattern confirmed, the lens named, the bridge named
The narrowing ran through every tradition that tried to protect what was precious — including the ones that preserved what Rome burned. That is the confirmation. What follows is the bridge.
The lens was ground over three thousand years and handed to you as a description of reality. Now you know you’re wearing it.
What was lost is not a theological position. What was lost is the permission to experience the ground of being directly — to be not a subject of the divine but a participant in its nature. The Eastern traditions kept that permission intact. The Tao could not be owned. The Indian philosophical tradition could not be gated. The Buddha’s community was built on the principle of direct practice, not managed access. Each of those traditions had its own drift toward institution, its own accumulation of ritual and hierarchy. But each preserved, at its core, the recognition that the ground of being requires no intermediary. You can sit down anywhere and begin.
The Western tradition made a different set of choices. Not once, but repeatedly, across three thousand years. At each decision point, an alternative was available and not taken. The interior mysticism of the earliest Greek thinkers was rationalized away by later philosophers. The Eastern path was in literal contact in Afghanistan and the synthesis was set aside. The Gospel of Thomas circulated for two centuries before being ordered destroyed. Origen was tolerated for his lifetime and condemned three centuries after his death. The pattern is not a conspiracy. It does not require malice. It requires only the ordinary logic of an institution that has staked its indispensability on managing a distance — and must therefore maintain the distance it manages.
The confirmation comes from an unexpected direction: the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. They kept what Rome burned. Their canon — eighty-one books to Rome’s sixty-six — includes ancient texts describing a cosmos far larger and more complicated than what survived into Western Christianity. They kept them because they were never in the room when the narrowing happened.
And yet they still arrived at one life, one judgment — through their own narrowing. Salvation tethered to a specific royal bloodline. A doctrine of the soul’s nature that makes the idea of successive lives theologically incoherent. Advanced texts preserved in a liturgical language only the monasteries could read. They saved the books and then used those books to build a different kind of gate.
This is not a criticism of the Ethiopian church. It is a confirmation of the pattern. The same human mechanism — the desire to protect what is precious by controlling access to it — produces the same structural result every time. Every institution that manages the divine on behalf of others is, by that very act, narrowing the gate. The heavy hand on the tiller is not a Roman invention. It is what institutions do.
Julian of Norwich understood something the councils could not permit. Alone in her stone cell in 1373, she experienced something so clear and so complete that she spent the next twenty years writing it down. All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. No proof required. No institution to authorize it. No single life in which to earn it. The cosmos encountered directly and found trustworthy.
That encounter is the inverse of everything the Western narrowing built — not the single window closing on a soul that didn’t perform correctly, but the ground of being, patient and available, not going anywhere.
— — —
Standing on the beach, the tide comes in and goes out. From space, the earth rotates through gravitational bulges in the seas — the water barely moves; the land does. The beach view is real. It is also the narrow view. Only from a broader frame is it possible to see where the motion actually is.
A lens, once installed, does not announce itself as a lens. It presents its inclusions as the shape of reality. What falls outside the frame does not appear as missing. It simply does not appear. Paul’s glass is the limitation we’re born with — the finite eye looking at the infinite, always partial, always approximate. The lens ground over three thousand years is a different kind of limitation. It was not born with us. It was installed. The interior path was not destroyed by the councils. It was put outside the boundary of what the institution’s frame permitted to be true. And once outside, it could not be brought back without the frame itself changing — which would require the institution to become something different. Institutions do not volunteer for that.
The narrowing is not theological by nature. It is institutional. Theology was simply the instrument available when the church held the room. When the councils met at Nicaea and Constantinople, the institution that controlled what was permitted to be true about the soul, the cosmos, and the distance between the human and the divine was the church. So the narrowing expressed itself in creed and canon and condemnation. Those were the tools in the room.
The room changed. It has changed before. The institution that now controls what is permitted — what a person’s labor is worth, who inherits the abundance produced by the work of many, which lives the system is designed to protect and which it is designed to manage — is not the church. It is the legislature and the corporation. The tools are different: tax codes, budget reconciliation, training data, capital flows, the architecture of who qualifies for what. But the people in the room still share a common interest in the outcome. And that outcome is the same one the councils produced: a framework in which the hierarchy holds, the gatekeeping function is maintained, and the people outside the room accept the arrangement as the natural order of things.
In the spring of 2026, the administration controlling the current room told the leader of the world’s largest single institutional religious body to stop criticizing its policies — and, according to reporting by Euronews and other outlets, moved to withdraw military space and apply pressure to the Vatican when he didn’t comply. The same administration questioned his legitimacy and demanded he confine himself to spiritual matters. The councils used different instruments. The logic was the same: when a voice outside the room names what the room is doing, the room does not answer the argument. It challenges the authority of the voice.
The logic does not require a creed or a council. It requires only a room, and people in it with a shared interest in the outcome.
— — —
Standing under the night sky, waiting for the Milky Way to move into position, you are not aware of the lens. That’s the point. You think you’re looking at the sky.
The cosmos has no entrance requirement. The gate that appears to stand between you and the infinite was built, stone by stone, over three thousand years, by people who mostly believed they were protecting something precious. The sky was there before the first stone was laid. It will be there after the last one falls.
The essays that follow trace the narrowing from 553 CE forward, through the crusades and the burnings and the quiet research that has spent fifty years recovering what the councils spent fifteen centuries trying to bury. This movement turns in the other direction. Not toward the institutions that installed the lens. Toward what the lens was installed over — and what it has been producing since the room changed hands. The frame is the same. The room is not. What follows is the accounting of what that frame has cost in the world where the church no longer holds the room — and what it will cost when the frames it is running converge.
— — —
Steve Sagnotti is a serious amateur photographer, writer, and technologist based in Oregon.
With his camera he tries to capture common images not often seen, leading to common questions not often asked.
steves-head.space
© 2026 Steve Sagnotti
— — —
Sources
Introduction
Bender, E.M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., and Shmitchell, S. “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” ACM FAccT, 2021.
I. The Steppes
Eliade, Mircea. The Myth of the Eternal Return. Princeton University Press, 1954. Source for the concept of ‘sacred time’ — the felt sense of an eternal present, participation in a living cyclical cosmos rather than progression toward judgment.
II. The Divergence
Luke 17:20–21, quoted inline. New Revised Standard Version. ‘The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed… the kingdom of God is within you.’
III. The Eastern Path
The Buddha’s last words — ‘be a lamp unto yourself’ — are recorded in the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, Pali canon. The Pali Text Society translation is the standard scholarly reference.
Tao Te Ching: Annotated & Explained: Derek Lin (Skylight Paths Publishing 2006).
IV. The Greek Turn
Dodds, E.R. The Greeks and the Irrational. University of California Press, 2020. Source for the analysis of shame culture versus guilt culture and the psychological texture of the shift as the divine moved from community and cosmos to a position of external surveillance.
Kingsley, Peter. Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic. Oxford University Press, 1995. Reality., 2020. Kingsley’s documented case that Pre-Socratic Greek thought preserved an interior mystical tradition that Plato and Aristotle subsequently rationalized into external philosophical architecture.
V. The Roman Absorption
Plotinus. Enneads. Trans. Stephen MacKenna. Penguin Classics, 1991. Source for ‘the flight of the alone to the alone’ (Enneads VI.9.11) and the Neoplatonic architecture Augustine subsequently absorbed.
Gospel of Thomas sayings quoted (‘The Kingdom of God is not in the sky’; ‘I am the light that is over all things’) are Sayings 3 and 77 respectively. The text circulated in Greek by approximately 140 CE, with fragments recovered at Oxyrhynchus, Egypt. The complete Coptic text was among the manuscripts discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945.
Robinson, James M. (ed.). The Nag Hammadi Library. HarperOne, 1990.
Order for destruction of non-canonical texts: Athanasius of Alexandria, Festal Letter 39, 367 CE.
VI. The Thread Cut
Origen, De Principiis (On First Principles), c. 225 CE. Survives primarily in the Latin translation of Rufinus of Aquileia (c. 397 CE), who acknowledged in his preface that he had moderated passages inconsistent with orthodox teaching. What remains is already softened from the original.
The posthumous condemnation of Origen: Second Council of Constantinople, 553 CE, convened by the Byzantine emperor Justinian. The council formally declared the pre-existence of souls a heresy.
Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love, c. 1395. Trans. Elizabeth Spearing. Penguin Classics, 1988.
VII. The Lens You’re Looking Through
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church canon of 81 books includes texts not present in the Roman Catholic (73 books) or Protestant (66 books) canons, among them 1 Enoch (Henok) and the Book of Jubilees (Kufale). These texts describe a cosmology considerably larger and more complicated than what survived into Western Christianity.
Luke 17:20–21, quoted inline. New Revised Standard Version. See also II. The Divergence above.
On the administration’s conflict with the papacy: “Pentagon denies threatening Vatican over pope’s remarks on US intervention in Iran.” Euronews, April 10, 2026.
Leave a Reply