1Yahweh, who shall dwell in your sanctuary? Who shall live on your holy hill? 2He who walks blamelessly does what is right, and speaks truth in his heart; 3He who doesn’t slander with his tongue, nor does evil to his friend, nor casts slurs against his fellow man; 4In whose eyes a vile man is despised, but who honors those who fear Yahweh; he who keeps an oath even when it hurts, and doesn’t change; 5he who doesn’t lend out his money for usury, nor take a bribe against the innocent. He who does these things shall never be shaken.
The psalm opens with a simple question: who gets to be at home in God's presence? The answer is not about grand religious achievement but about ordinary things, like telling the truth, not spreading gossip, keeping your word even when it costs you, and treating money fairly. These are habits practiced in small moments, mostly unseen. The closing promise of steadiness suggests that a life lined up with honesty tends to be hard to shake.
Death is neither a good nor a bad thing, for that alone which is something can be a good or a bad thing: but that which is nothing, and reduces all things to nothing, does not hand us over to either fortune, because good and bad require some material to work upon. Fortune cannot take hold of that which Nature has let go, nor can a man be unhappy if he is nothing. Your son has passed beyond the border of the country where men are forced to labour; he has reached deep and everlasting peace.
Aubrey Stewart, 1889
Seneca wrote this consolation, probably around AD 40, for Marcia, the daughter of the historian Cremutius Cordus. She was still grieving for her son three years after his death. The essay survives as one of the twelve Dialogi, copied through the medieval manuscript tradition, chiefly an eleventh-century codex from Monte Cassino that is now in Milan.
On the night when we play at being frightened of the dead, Seneca offers a plainer view: the dead are beyond harm, and our grief belongs to the living. His argument is that death cannot be a bad thing for the person who has died, because nothing remains in them for misfortune to hurt. That does not make grief foolish, and he knew it. What he asks is that we separate our own loss from any imagined suffering of the one we have lost. That separation can ease the guilt and dread that often make mourning heavier than it needs to be.
PracticeThink of one person you have lost, or one fear about dying that has been bothering you. Write two columns on a card: what I have lost, and what I am afraid they suffer. Then read the second column slowly in light of Seneca's point, and give your attention to the first column, which is the part that is truly yours to grieve and to honour.
Around 1095, a theologian argued that fire never burns cotton. His reasoning anticipated Hume by six centuries.
Put a ball of cotton in a flame and it burns. Everyone has seen this, and almost no one thinks it needs explaining. The Persian theologian al-Ghazali (died 1111) chose the example because it seemed so obvious. In The Incoherence of the Philosophers, written around 1095, he used it to attack a view held by followers of Avicenna. On that view, fire necessarily causes burning, because of what fire and cotton are.
His target was practical. The Qur'an reports miracles, including Abraham being thrown into a fire and surviving. If fire must burn whatever it touches, those stories are impossible. Al-Ghazali argued that they are not. He said the link between contact and combustion is not a logical entailment. Nothing contradictory happens if fire touches cotton and the cotton stays whole. Observation shows only that the two events come together. It does not show that one forces the other.
His positive answer was that God is the real cause of the burning. God creates the combustion each time fire meets cotton, and does so out of habit, not necessity. The habit is steady enough to make science possible, but it could be suspended. This position is called occasionalism. The contact is the occasion, and God does the causing. Scholars still disagree about whether al-Ghazali held it outright. Some read him as also allowing ordinary created causes as a second possibility.
The idea outlived its context. In seventeenth-century France, Nicolas Malebranche built a full occasionalist system. Hume, in 1748, argued that we see only one event following another and never the tie between them, though he did not appeal to God. The question both were working on is still open: when one thing follows another, is anything doing the making?
RememberAl-Ghazali pointed out that we observe fire and burning together but never observe a force joining them, and that gap has been argued over ever since.
Read nextPeter Adamson, A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps (podcast and book series), on al-Ghazali; or Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section 7
Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 'Occasionalism' and 'al-Ghazali'