The Gargoyle

by Andrew Davidson

Eckhart’s position was that anything that is good can become better, and whatever may become better may become best. God cannot be referred to as “good,” “better,” or “best” because He is above all things. If a man says that God is wise, the man is lying because anything that is wise can become wiser. Anything that a man might say about God is incorrect, even calling Him by the name of God. God is “super-essential nothingness” and “transcendent Being,” said Seuse, beyond all words and beyond all understanding. The best a man can do is to remain silent, because any time he prates on about God, he is committing the sin of lying. The true master knows that if he had a God he could understand, he would never hold Him to be God.

The urge is always with me to retouch yesterday’s canvas with today’s paintbrush and cover the things that fill me with regret,

The cliché goes that at twenty a person has the face that God gave him, but at forty he has the face he has earned. But if the face and the soul are intertwined so that the face can reflect the soul, surely it follows that the soul can also reflect the face. As Nietzsche wrote: “The criminologists tell us that the typical criminal is ugly: monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo (a monster in face, and a monster in soul).”

Leave it to a Viking to disarm you with eloquence when you least expect it.

Who brings money to a hallucination?

Everyone’s past, I try to rationalize, is nothing more than the collection of memories they choose to remember.