Puritan : member of the reform movement in Church of England that sought to ‘purify’ the Church from remnants of Roman Catholic “popery” retained after the settlement made under Queen Elizabeth I in 16th century. Puritanism imposed its doctrines & practices on the English-speaking world.
... the problem with which the Puritan wrestled in hours of gloom and darkness - the problem of sin and redemption, of the world-wide struggle of evil against good. The intense moral concentration of the Puritan had given an almost bodily shape to Page 73 spiritual abstractions before Milton gave them life and being in the forms of Sin and Death." The Puritan in Milton is also responsible... is that the matter rather than the manner is Puritan, and even in the matter the basic theme alone is such, for around this theme Milton erects a magnificent edifice of references to the wide world's culture. However, when we label his poetic manner as non-Puritan we must make a reservation just as we have made when labelling his matter as Puritan. There is, for all its opulence, an austerity... Waldock traces to Puritan theology the fact that "it does not come very naturally to Milton to suggest a loving God". This theology accounts for the woodenness so often observed of God's speeches. We have a verbose and argumentative Deity who seems to want considerably, if not altogether, in the feeling of the poetic. Again, Milton had very little humour: if he had been un-Puritan enough to have more ...
... narrow and carefully guarded limit can be combined with a strict ethical life. He evolves the puritan who objects to pleasure on principle; not only in his extremes—and a predominant impulse tends to become absorbing and leads towards extremes—but in the core of his temperament he remains fundamentally the puritan. The misunderstanding between these two sides of our nature is an inevitable circumstance... for its principle, always, the indulgence of the average sensational and sensuous man freed from the conventions of morality by a superficial intellectualism and aestheticism. Nor even can we take Puritan England as the ethical type; for although there was there a strenuous, an exaggerated culture of character and the ethical being, the determining tendency was religious, and the religious impulse is ...
... ancients saw these matters with other eyes and through another consciousness. We have, in modern times, a movement towards a more conscious and courageous, knowledge of things that were taboo to puritan ages. Not to shut one's eyes to the lower, darker and hidden strands of our nature, but to bring them out into the light of day and to face them is the best way of dealing with such elements, which... energy that inspire and move and sustain the cosmos. The Upanishad most emphatically enjoins that one must not decry this cosmic godhead or deny any of its elements, not even such as are a taboo to the puritan mind. It is in and through an unimpaired global consciousness that one attains the All-Life and lives uninterruptedly and perennially: Sarvamanveti jyok jīvati. Still the Upanishad says this ...
... it. What he meant to say was that by Brahmacharya is generally understood a mental & moral control, a cessation because of a mental rule. Such a control especially if undertaken from an ascetic or puritan attitude, only keeps chained or even suppresses the vital power behind the sexual impulse and does not really purify or change it. The true motive for overcoming the sexual impulse is the inner psychic... true spiritual or psychic regard on women. But an absence of all sexual impulse is not necessary, still less an ascetic or puritanic turn in this matter. On the contrary. Neither the conventional Puritan nor the coarse animal man can receive anything from her. This is what A.G said about your letter. Now, since you have these intuitions, why not act on them? Why not try even from a distance to open ...
... temperament seems specially to respond. It would be possible to a reader with a depreciatory turn to find flaws in it, such as the pseudo-pastoral setting, the too powerful intrusion of St. Peter and puritan theological controversy into that incongruous setting and the image of the hungry sheep which someone not in sympathy with Christian feeling and traditional imagery might find even ludicrous or at... epics. So too is Paradise Lost . The grandeur of his verse and language is constant and unsinking to the end and makes the presentation always sublime. We have to accept for the moment Milton's dry Puritan theology and his all too human picture of the celestial world and its denizens and then we can feel the full greatness of the epic. But the point is that this greatness in itself seems to have less ...
... names it is the philosophical intellect ruled by theology: Dante brings mediaeval Roman Catholic thought to bear upon the cosmos, Milton post-Renaissance Puritan thought to survey the uni-verse. Their ancestor, as it were, in Graeco-Roman Classicism is Lucretius of De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), but... shalt know By tasting it: and how hard to the feet Another's stairs are, up and down to go. (Laurence Binyon) Milton the stern Puritan springs several surprises of the Page 38 utmost poignancy held on the rein: those lines Arnold admired ...
... temperament seems specially to respond. It would be possible to a reader with a depreciatory turn to find flaws in it, such as the pseudo-pastoral setting, the too powerful intrusion of St. Peter and puritan theological controversy into that incongruous setting and the image of the hungry sheep which someone not in sympathy with Christian feeling and traditional imagery might find even ludicrous or at... So too is Paradise Lost. The grandeur of his verse and language is constant and unsinking to the end and makes the presentation always sublime. We have to accept for the moment Milton's dry Puritan theology and his all too human picture of the celestial world and its denizens and then we can feel the full greatness of the epic. But the point is that this greatness in itself seems to have less ...
... ancients saw these matters with other eyes and through another consciousness. We have, in modern times, a movement towards a more Conscious and courageous knowledge of things that were taboo to puritan ages. Not to shut one's eyes to the lower, darker and hidden strands of our nature, but to bring them out into the light of day and to face them is the best way of dealing with such elements, which... that inspire and move and sustain the cosmos. The Upanishad most emphatically enjoins that one must not decry this cosmic godhead or deny any of its elements, not even such as are a taboo to the puritan mind. It is in and through an unimpaired global consciousness that one attains the All-Life and lives uninterruptedly and perennially: Sarvamanveti jyok jivati. Still the Upanishad says this ...
... his forehead—it is like that of a scholar. He has close-cropped hair ready for jail. SATYENDRA: From his appearance one can make out an ascetic type. SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, ascetic and puritan, but a mental puritan. Not vital, because his lips indicate otherwise. Only his chin has not the necessary strength for vital indulgence. PURANI: In spite of all his rigorous practical and routine life, his ...
... know. The word has been used in all Indian languages for a long time. If you say that such expressions should not be used, that is different. But how are they vulgar? Since when has Bengal become so puritan? It seems to be a Brahmo Samaj influence. NIRODBARAN: Tagore never uses such words. In Sanskrit they are used extensively. SRI AUROBINDO: Has Bhattacharya been to Shantiniketan? NIRODBARAN:... "whore". At one time in Europe, particularly in England, such words were considered vulgar and they were not used. But now everybody is using them. The pre-Brahmo Bengal was also to a certain extent puritan. Moni said that he was not allowed by the teachers to sing in school: it was considered immoral. If music is immoral, then there can be no question about dancing, and yet in ancient India even the ...
... man. Gifted supremely with the artist's sense for the warmth and beauty of life, he had turned with a smile from the savage austerities of the ascetic and with a shudder from the dreary creed of the Puritan. But now in that valley of the shadow of death his soul longed for the sustaining air of religion. More and more the philosophic bias made its way into his later novels, until at last the thinker in ...
... let it be poured by gallons into his stomach. Have in beautiful women constantly before him and if he once raise his eyes above their anklets, shave him clean and sell him into the most severe and Puritan house in Bagdad. Nay, I will reform thee, old sinner. Page 150 IBRAHIM Oh, her lips! her sweet lips! JAAFAR You speak to a drunken man, my lord. HAROUN Tomorrow bring ...
... impulses of Nature—both of them eternal—and through the ages they have perplexed and tormented humanity by their perpetual companionship in an always unfinished and inconclusive strife, dividing us into Puritan and Pagan, Stoic and Epicurean, worldling and ascetic, & perpetuating an opposition that rests on a false division of a double unity, maintaining a strife that can lead to no final victory. The Seer ...
... stray remark about "Kaka" Kalelkar, a prominent Maharashtrian social leader, comes to mind. He paid a few days' visit to the Ashram in the middle 'thirties. Several people found him a bit of a Puritan with some rigid Gandhian scruples. But the Mother was pleased with him and said something like: "He has a clear clean character, a nature well-disciplined, a good preparatory ground for something ...
... East and the early sunrise illumines the East with a pearl-like sheen. Referring to the gold dug out by the fallen angels to build their infernal kingdom of pomp and splendour, Milton's puritan voice rings out in indictment: And digg'd out ribs of gold. Let none admire That riches grow in hell; that soil may best Deserve the precious bane. 6 This concept of gold as ...
... British public that they could not for a long time make up their mind how to take him. At first they took him for a jester dancing with cap and bells, then for a new kind of mocking Hebrew Prophet or Puritan reformer! Needless to say, both judgments were entirely out of focus. The Irishman is, on one side of him, the vital side, a passionn é , imaginative and romantic, intensely emotional, violently ...
... to be found in the disparity between Milton's professed aim, which was to justify the ways of God to man, and the intellectual means available to him for fulfilling his purpose. The theology of the Puritan religion was a poor enough aid for so ambitious a purpose; but the Scriptural legend treated was poetically sufficient if only it had received throughout a deeper interpretation. Dante's theology had ...
... a subordinate place so that the mind may absorb itself persistently in mental pursuits or idealisms or great political or personal ambitions (Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini). The ascetic and the Puritan try to suppress it mostly or altogether. In our Yoga the principle is that all must become an instrument of the Spirit and the parts of enjoyment taste the Ananda in things, not the animal enjoyment ...
... British public that they could not for a long time make up their mind how to take him. At first they took him for a jester dancing with cap and bells, then for a new kind of mocking Hebrew prophet or Puritan reformer! Needless to say, both judgments were entirely out of focus. The Irishman is, on one side of him, the vital side, a passioné , imaginative and romantic, intensely emotional, violently impulsive ...
... there is a double punishment and a double reward for sin and virtue; for the sinner is first tortured in hell and afterwards afflicted for the same sins in another life here and the righteous or the puritan is rewarded with celestial joys and afterwards again pampered for the same virtues and good deeds in a new terrestrial existence. These are very summary popular notions and offer no foothold to ...
... And its reproduction is bound to a means that the ethical sense even when most tolerant feels to be animal and inferior, is inclined to regard as immoral in itself and, when raised to its ascetic or puritan acuities, rejects as vile. And yet when once we put aside our limited human conceptions and look with impersonal eyes on this vast and various and wonderful vital nature into which we are born, we ...
... Krishna stealing the robes of the Gopis one of the deepest parables of God's ways with the soul, the devotee a perfect rendering in divine act of his heart's mystic experiences, the prurient & the Puritan (two faces of one temperament) only a lustful story. Men bring what they have in themselves and see it reflected in the Scripture. Page 490 482) My lover took away my robe of sin and I ...
... Krishna stealing the robes of the Gopis one of the deepest parables of God's ways with the soul, the devotee a perfect rendering in divine act of his heart's mystic experiences, the prurient and the Puritan (two faces of one temperament) only a lustful story. Men bring what they have in themselves and see it reflected in the Scripture. Page 345 483—My lover took away my robe of sin and I let ...
... the epic possibility lost in Marlowe attained its goal through Milton, though from a different plane. We might say it attained its goal in a far more consummate manner, too, because of the Puritan poet's maturer, more stable, constructive and intellectual disposition; but in spite of the flaws we might expect to accompany Marlowe's hand, there would have been in his composition not a greater ...
... to get the whole country into his grip and to menace the independence of neighbouring nations in Europe and even the security of insular England. Wordsworth became a stern Tory and a supporter of Puritan institutions: he even went to the extent of devoting several dull sonnets to the theme of Capital Punishment! His change of mind is a little complicated. We can, of course, understand his anti-Napoleon ...
... 68 we get the proper background for Blake's mood in his poem's fifth stanza. The stern and unrelenting sentence of permanent banishment of Satan and his followers from Heaven Milton the Puritan could view calmly: Blake, though no less a champion of "prophetic wrath", was a more sensitive soul and, while revealing in his poem the divinity of Christ the Tyger to the full, he could not help ...
... the packed splendour of a Miltonic moment. But Page 16 Sri Aurobindo is not only able to command the grand style at will; he can also bring to his work a quality which the great Puritan in the days of his Paradise Lost as good as allowed to atrophy, a subtle yet puissant interfusion of fantasy with strength and grandeur, a touch half Coleridgean half Shelleyan in the midst of Miltonic ...
... Albless, a Parsi disciple-friend who Page 47 was living in the Ashram and was Amal’s associate in editing Mother India, took up this work and helped me to publish the book. But he was of a puritan temperament and would not allow any flippant note or the playful swear words of Sri Aurobindo to see the light. Neither would he allow any of my weaknesses to be published, for that would lower the ...
... occult reality that gives sanctity to a particular place or region. The saintly soul has always been also a pilgrim, physically, to holy places, even to one single holy place, if he so chooses. The puritan poet may say tauntingly: Here pilgrims roam, that strayed so far to seek In Golgotha him dead who lives in heaven – the pilgrim soul of Roerich declares with but equal vehemence ...
... poetic criticism, but of those of prosaic, objective, rational judgment, to call in question Rama's spiritual greatness, because he wept for the missing Sita in the forest, or killed (unjustly, as the Puritan would say) Vali, brother of the ape-king Sugriva, 165 or Sri Krishna's divine character, because he made love (so it appeared outwardly) to Radha and any number of Gopis, and induced Yudhishthira ...
... stuff as La Figlia che Piange?" 7 Again, on Nirod once remarking that some people criticised Nishikanto's poetry for its lack of refinement, Sri Aurobindo asked: "Since when has Bengal become so Puritan?", and added: Moni said that he was not allowed to sing in school by the teachers: it was considered immoral. If music is immoral, then there can be no question about dancing, and yet in ...
... identification with the obscure movements of our lower nature. Poised in the psychic consciousness, or even basking in its light, we feel each impure or ignorant movement of our nature, not as the puritan feels it, as something sinful and execrable which has to be Page 215 stifled or slashed, but rather as a wrong or perverted play of energy casting a sombre shadow upon the glory of the ...
... and Whitehead chimes with him when he says, "The insistence upon the rules of conduct marks the ebb Page 465 of religious fervour". He reminds us that St. Paul denounced the Law and Puritan divines, and contemptuously spoke of the rags of righteousness. Is it not time the ardent advocates of moral reform took this truth to heart and turned their benevolent energies to deeper and more ...
... of this sort is only to invite confusion and exclude light. We in Bengal with our tendency to the sins of the blood are perhaps more apt than others to call to our aid the gloomy moralities of the Puritan; in censuring Bankim we are secretly fortifying ourselves against ourselves; but in this instance it is a false caution. The cultured Bengali begins life with a physical temperament already delicate ...
... who took him prisoner at Worcester and hanged him. You were to have married Lady Alicia Nevil, when the conspiracy of which you were one of the heads as well as the hand destined to strike down the Puritan tyrant, was discovered by the discernment, luck and ruthless skill of Colonel Luke Walter." The young Cavalier started and uttered a furious imprecation. "It was he;" said the other, "he has ...
... nothing should be eliminated, but each thing must be in its place in total harmony with all the rest. And then all these things that seem so "bad", so "reprehensible", so "unacceptable" to the puritan mind, would become movements of delight and freedom in a totally divine life. And then nothing would prevent us from knowing, understanding, feeling and living this wonderful laughter of the Supreme ...
... nothing should be eliminated, but each thing must be in its place in total harmony with all the rest. And then all these things that seem so "bad", so "reprehensible", so "unacceptable" to the puritan mind, would become movements of delight and freedom in a totally divine life. And then nothing Page 155 would prevent us from knowing, understanding, feeling and living this wonderful laughter ...
... untrustworthy if it is an obedience not to the higher law of the soul, but to an outward moral law, a code of conduct. For then in place of a lifting enthusiasm we have the rigidity of the Pharisee, a puritan fierceness or narrowness or the life-killing tyranny of a single insufficient side of the nature. This is not yet that higher mental movement, but a straining towards it, an attempt to rise above the ...
... in the cold months. Here he is like Milton who has left it on record that his finest inspiration came between the autumnal equinox and the vernal equinox. Between September 21 and March 21 the old Puritan poet sat day after day in his favourite pose, one leg thrown over the arm of a chair, and dictated his magnificent thunder to his bored daughters or secretaries. There is something cold about Milton's ...
... Beauty that was Truth. The mere physical looks did not matter in the ultimate judgment, the ultimate grading. Here we discern a premium put on Character, on Goodness. But one thing we must remember: a puritan virtue, a self-torturing ethicism, a bigoted and persecuting morality was never what the Greeks meant by Goodness. Greek Goodness had a grace about it, a wideness about it, a balance and harmony about ...
... The poetic tone, though not the idea and feeling, is here akin to Milton's and indeed Wordsworth wrote the passage after remembering Milton's invocation to Urania, one of the grandest by that Puritan poet: ... Thou with Eternal Wisdom didst converse, Wisdom thy sister, and with her didst play In presence of the Almighty Father, pleased With thy celestial song. Up led by thee ...
... Paradise Lost, A, 102 fn. 162 Proclus, 134 Prophecy, 264 'Prospectus", 231 Proverbs of Hell, 138 Psalms of David. 49 fns. 19,20,21 Psychology, 4, 141,142,146 Puritan, Puritanism, 59 Raine, Kathleen, i, ii, vii, 4,25-29, 50 fn. 23, 134,144 fn. 18, 146,167-97, 222,231,237,258,261, 262,263-65 Rajan, B., 45,101 Ratio, Reason, 70,71 Reader's ...
... odd hour of the night to take down the dictation of the lines - They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow Through Eden took their solitary way - the blind revolutionary Puritan, fallen on evil days and evil tongues in Restoration England, could not have cared much Page 129 whether his own "solitary way" went further on or not. I have no intuition of having ...
... nothing SHOULD be done away with, but each thing must find its own place in total harmony with the rest. Then all those things that appear so "evil," so "reprehensible" and "unacceptable" to the puritan mind would become movements of joy and freedom in a totally divine life. And then nothing would stop us from knowing, understanding, feeling and living this wonderful Laughter of the Supreme who takes ...
... subordinate place so that the mind may absorb itself persistently in mental pursuits or idealisms or great political or personal ambitions (Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini). The ascetic and the Puritan try to suppress it mostly or altogether. In our yoga the principle is that all must become an instrument of the Spirit and the parts of enjoyment taste the Ananda in things, not the animal enjoyment ...
... with the language and imagery of the depiction - though everything has undergone a subtle recreation in terms of Blake's individual vision and mentality. This mentality is less severely Puritan, more humanely sensitive, than Milton's. So it feels shaken and dismayed at the same time that it is splendour-struck by the superbly destructive power emanating from one who has usually been regarded ...
... a deep and profound wisdom born from life itself, a wisdom as of one who has truly lived his life and lived it fully, through all the senses and is yet somewhere free and above them. His is not a puritan, holier-than-thou attitude that makes you feel poor and low before a greatness man cannot touch. Greatness yes, but one that moves among the natural life of Page 50 humanity, of ...
... saying in his 1947 letter, "I am prepared to admit the very patent defects of Paradise Lost", he can still call for a sympathetic sense and affirm: "We have to accept for the moment Milton's dry Puritan theology and his all too human picture of the celestial world and its denizens and then we can feel the full greatness of the epic." 7 Sri Aurobindo has written several other things on ...
... British public that they could not for a long time make up their mind how to take him. At first they took him for a jester dancing with cap and bells, then for a new kind of mocking Hebrew prophet or Puritan reformer! Needless to say, both judgments were entirely out of focus.... At bottom he has the possibility in him of a modern Curtius, leaping into the yawning pit for a cause, a Utopist or a Don ...
... there is a double punishment and a double reward for sin and virtue; for the sinner is first tortured in hell and afterwards afflicted for the same sins in another life here and the righteous or the puritan is rewarded with celestial joys and afterwards again pampered for the same virtues and good deeds in a new terrestrial existence." (Ibid., p. 805) True truth: Vision of the Integral Yoga: ...
... asked to be excused for the bantering tone he could not resist when his own Karmayoga based on experience was tilted at. Very freely he used swear-words for the sake of fun or perhaps to shock the puritan temper. I was occasionally on the perilous brink of irreverence. When people complained of it, he replied, "I return the compliment—I mean, reply without restraint, decorum or the right grave rhythm ...
... establish his own dark reign on earth. The Light is heavily obscured, the divine Inhabitant is thickly veiled, and the "eyes of the creatrix Bliss are closed". Joy is held a sin: A puritan God made pleasure a poisonous fruit, Or red drug in the market-place of Death, And sin the child of Nature's ecstasy. 43 Nevertheless it is folly to believe that, not ...
... The puritans lay great stress on civility, decency and good conduct. But, on that account, it cannot be said that they are endowed with a great sense of beauty as well. History testifies otherwise. Puritan England is a glaring proof how even decency can be an embodiment of ugliness. And the pen of Kalidasa gloriously proves that obscene things are not always bound to be ugly. When does the ...
... ancient literature also dealt with them and nobody took any particular notice. The English write of them more crudely than the French—as a reaction, I suppose, to the suppression. It is during the Puritan and Non-conformist period that people suddenly became self-conscious and felt ashamed. EVENING SRI AUROBINDO (after trying out flexion of his knee, as medically advised) : Can't see if the flexion ...
... receive his blessings, except the rasam 1 . When on his arrival in Pondicherry he was given rasam , he enjoyed it very much and said in our talks, "It has a celestial taste!" He was neither a puritan god nor an epicure; only, he had no hankering or attachment for anything. His meal ended with a big tumbler of orange juice which he sipped slowly, looking after each sip to see how much was left, ...
... Oscar Wilde and would make a name for himself in English poetry. Each of the three brothers led his separate life. However, there was nothing austere about Sri Aurobindo, and certainly nothing of the puritan ( the prurient, 8 as he called it); it was just that he was "elsewhere," and his world was replete. He even had a way of jesting with a straight face, which never left him: Sense of humour? It ...
... virtues as the rajasic ego is obsessed with its desires and passions, and the tamasic ego with its incapacity. The ego of the altruist or the humanitarian, of the callow religionist or the shallow puritan is a subtly magnified ego, all the more difficult to detect and renounce, because it is masked in apparent selflessness and buttressed with its ethical or religious principles. When the humanitarian ...
... SRI AUROBINDO: That puritanic element exists in many places. Even Ruskin who was considered an authority on the aesthetic element in art had puritanism in his blood. Puritanism has been brought from Europe to India. In India even ascetics were not puritans. PURANI: Musriwalla is trying to introduce some ideas of spirituality. He has written three or four books on the lives of Buddha and others ...
... transpicuous, as it were, and showed a refreshing and resplendent future beyond them. Her courageous glowing gaiety made her independent also of dull formalities, awed restraints, long-faced puritanisms. She was on the alert to find occasions for wit and did not bother if it drew the blush to anyone's cheek. A crowd of students pressed around her at the Madras Station some years ago and many asked ...
... It's even more resistant than materialism. Page 456 Of course! Nothing is more terrible than idealists, they're the worst. They're worse than the bad people. Oh, if you mean the puritans, the Protestants... dreadful! They're the worst. Catholicism still retains something of the occult sense, and after all, they have a certain adoration for the Virgin, which keeps them in contact with ...
... came to aid the persecutor (Saul of Tarsus), it came to St. Augustine the profligate, to Jagai and Madhai of infamous fame, to Bilwamangal and many others whose conversion might well scandalise the puritanism of the human moral intelligence; but it can come to the righteous also—curing them of their self-righteousness and leading to a purer consciousness beyond these things. It is a power that is superior ...
... Planck is the ultimate consequence of their scientific intellect or a reflection of some other non-scientific faculty. A class of continental scientists says that the religious sentiment and the puritanism of the scientists of the British Isles are so strong Page 294 that they will not feel happy unless they can introduce a few Biblical expressions even into the table of logarithms. ...
... advise him. He has perfect freedom to drink. What you should tell him is to observe the terms of the contract and give proofs regularly. 8 This was quite typical of Sri Aurobindo: no interference. Puritans have been distributing their good advice to the world for a few thousand years now—we really need SOMETHING else for things to change. Sri Aurobindo was changing the inside of things, He was going ...
... not its successful performance. I do not mean, however, that the received or dictionary sense of the word has to be always accepted. In dealing with these ancient writings such a scholastical puritanism would be less dangerous indeed than the licence of the philosophic commentators, but would still be seriously limiting. But in departing from the dictionary sense one must not depart from the native ...
... Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7 Spirituality in Art Is there any natural opposition between art and the spiritual life? The Puritans had cast aside poetry and music like poison. In the Talmud (the scripture of the Jews) there is the total prohibition to draw the picture of anybody, be he a man or a God. Plato in his Republic refused ...
... object of true worship which the poet dare not name openly is masked by a philosophical concept of Ultimate Reality". May I point out that the mystical urge is neither dry philosophy nor ascetic puritanism? It is a leap of the soul, a whole-hearted desire for union with Eternal Beauty, a kind of sexless sex, a passion based on continence. Nothing arid or barren here - everything a fire that purifies ...
... in order that religious error might survive. We see too that a narrow religious spirit often oppresses and impoverishes the joy and beauty of life, either from an intolerant asceticism or, as the Puritans attempted it, because they could not see that religious austerity is not the whole of religion, though it may be an important side of it, is not the sole ethico-religious approach to God, since love ...
... Page 97 constant and persistent and ubiquitous fight between the Divine and the undivine, between good and evil. Of course by "good" we must not mean always what puritanism or prudery or pacifism or any rigid rule or code sets up for our guidance: we must mean some profound urge towards surpassing our ignorance, meanness, cruelty, incapacity, ugliness and becoming ...
... put even two Pyrrhics in succession — Page 47 that is, four shorts in two pairs — you will come in for as much criticism from Prosodists as this Ashram of Yoga has incurred from Puritans by its group on group of girls in "shorts". When somehow four shorts (or slacks) do happen in succession; as in the second line of the three — With the brief beauty of her face drunk, blind ...
... attuned to it." In my latest letter I wrote: "1 have been keeping my eyes skinned for the use of 'the Divine' in English. Casually turning the pages of Bernard Shaw's Three Plays for Puritans in the Penguin Edition, what do I chance upon on pp. 133-34? In the 'Prologue' to his play 'Caesar and Cleopatra' included here Shaw imagines an Egyptian god addressing the modern audience. Towards ...
... doctrine, on the recalcitrant individual conscience. In its more tepid and moderate forms the revolt engendered such compromises as the Episcopalian Churches, at a higher degree of fervour Calvinistic Puritanism, at white heat a riot of individual religious judgment and imagination in such sects as the Anabaptist, Independent, Socinian and countless others. In the East such a movement divorced from all political ...
... say that Milton's women-folk must have themselves had a trying time with the poet. One of his wives is reported to have run away from him. He was not exactly an amiable person. He had the typical Puritan's low opinion of human nature (other people's human nature) and the censorious lip and even the heavy hand. He was a lifelong believer in the birch for young people. Enjambment and the feminine ...
... express subjects whose triviality brings it down far below its natural pitch of greatness, force or beauty. A pathetically sentimental love story, a rather dullhued tale of courtship among New England Puritans, the trifling doings and amours and chaff and chat of holiday-making undergraduates, these are not subjects in which either language or rhythm can rise to any great heights or reach out into revealing ...
... turn. It is almost always the case with those who suppress their vital being. It allows the pressure on itself, gets strong and then finds vent in some other direction. The same thing happened to the Puritans in England. Cromwell and his men came to power and became the worst oppressors. In Christianity the principle of non violence is there but it is meant to be practised for religious and spiritual ...
... primitiveness. They get such an obsession of certain primitive impulses like the sex,—in representing which they often become vulgar. Q. But you do not mean to say that the ancients were puritans or that sex was taboo in their arts ? A. Far from that. They had a more balanced view about the sex and about its place in life. They expressed their preception of the truth behind the crude ...
... month returned a married man. He brought home Mary Powell, the seventeen-year old daughter of a Royalist Justice of Peace. A little later war broke out between the Royalists and the Roundheads (the Puritans) to whose Page 141 party Milton belonged. Just before the war Mary's parents invited her to their house. Hardly a month had passed since the marriage. Milton consented to her visit ...
... struggling to deliver itself from the bondage of the euprepēs and the dikaion , mere decorousness, mere custom, mere social law and rule. The excess of this anti-aesthetic tendency is visible in Puritanism and the baser forms of asceticism. The progress of ethics in Europe has been largely a struggle between the Greek sense of aesthetic beauty and the Christian sense of a higher good marred on the ...
... his defence. That is why the English mind never understood Shaw and yet allowed itself to be captured by him, and its old established ideas, 'moral' positions, impenetrable armour of commercialised puritanism and self-righteous Victorian assurance to be ravaged and burned out of existence by Shaw and his allies. Anyone who knew Victorian England and sees the difference now cannot but be struck by it, ...
... measure. He supports himself on social conventions, laws & equities, but cannot limit himself by his supports. "Desire is sinful; observe duty and the Shastra, discourage & punish enjoyment," is the Puritan's law of self-repression; but duty is only one instinct of our nature and duty satisfied cannot eradicate the need of bliss. Asceticism digs deeper into the truth of things, "Compromise will not do" ...
... Internally it was all but bankrupt and for the past three years the harvests had been poor; its navy was run down and it had no standing army; it was torn between its Anglican Protestants, Catholics and Puritans; its nobles and courtiers were divided accordingly. Externally, every neighbouring power – France (manipulating Mary, Queen of Scots) and Spain foremost among them – was ready to pounce on the helpless ...
... It is a tribute to the accommodating spirit of Indian ethos that Islam that came from Arabia did not remain a "foreign" religion and developed a unique Indian flavor, which may not appeal to some puritans but inspires common Indian Muslims immensely. This unique intermingling of Hinduism and Islam led to the development of Bhakti and Tasawwuf, which have affected the hearts and minds of millions ...
... *It is a tribute to the accommodating spirit of Indian ethos that Islam that came from Arabia did not remain a 'foreign' religion and developed a unique Indian flavour, which may not appeal to some puritans but inspires common Indian Muslims immensely. This unique intermingling of Hinduism and Islam led to the development of Bhaktii and Tasawwuf, which have affected the hearts and minds of millions of ...
... একদিক ধরিয়া শান্তভােগের শিক্ষা, Epicureanism বা ভােগবাদ প্রচার করিলেন ৷ এই দুই মত, সমতাবাদ ও ভােগবাদ প্রাচীন য়ুরােপের শ্রেষ্ঠ নৈতিক মত বলিয়া জ্ঞাত ছিল, এবং আধুনিক য়ুরােপেও নব আকার ধারণ করিয়া Puritanism ও Paganismএর চির দ্বন্দ্ব সৃষ্টি করিয়াছে ৷ কিন্তু গীতােক্ত সাধনে সমতাবাদ ও শান্ত বা শুদ্ধ ভােগ একই কথা ৷ সমতা কারণ, শুদ্ধ ভােগ কাৰ্য ৷ সমতায় আসক্তি মরে, রাগদ্বেষ প্রশমিত হয়, আসক্তি নাশে এবং রাগদ্বেষ ...
... Divine Grace came to aid Saul of Tarsus the persecutor, to St. Augustine the profligate, to Jagai and Madhai of infamous fame, to Bilwamangal and many others whose conversion might well scandalise the puritanism of the human moral intelligence. But it can come to the righteous also—curing them of their self-righteousness and leading to a purer consciousness beyond these things. It is a power that is superior ...
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