ABSTRACT
The flight of the Holy House to Europe would have appeared to western Christians as a rescue operation. True religion, the religion of Love, did not leave Asia voluntarily; it was expelled. Its ejection by the Muslims is prefigured by its rejection by the Jews. The Orient was a region where God first spoke to Man, but where Man rejected God. It was construed, in Christian lore, as the land of blindness: the source of Light yet a place where the Light is not seen. It is the place where the presence of the sublime is most in evidence, and yet where it is not recognized, where Man continues to think of the sublime Lord as someone who is far removed beyond the confines of the ordinary world, rather than a force that infuses all. The paradox is that while it is the Orient where divinity was most immanent (through revelation and, later, incarnation), it is also the Orient where it was understood, by Jews and Muslims, to be radically transcendent, with the remote divinity separated from its creation.
