“…a god of purity and brightness and the clarity of perfect form, the most radiant and visible of all that is divine, but also a god always more distant, more hidden, whose arrows fly from farther and ever farther away; the shining one, the lord of poetry and song and prophecy, but also the god of wrathful countenance, who slays with the gentle bolt or instantanteous death; the lord of cleansing sunlight and of the clear, sweet water of living springs, the purifier and the healer, but also the death-dealing god of plague and spiritual contagion; wise, invincible, the god of consummate human and divine splendor, but also the god who can draw near only as the ever-withdrawing, and who can dwell among men only in the radiant mystery of that which is most exalted and unapproachable, in the cold beauty of a distance that can never be crossed; the god whose voice is as thunder, before whom one knows only one’s own transience, but the god of delight and kindly music and earthly joy; the slayer of the dragon and the one whos pseaks from the mouth of the dragon; baneful, beneficient; all beauty, all light and darkness; perfect revelation as perfect mystery.”
-the last priest of Apollo reflects on what the god has become in his imagination, taken from David Bentley Hart’s “The House of Apollo,” from the collection The Devil and Pierre Gernet (2012)
