In a cold thirteenth-century scriptorium, a monk makes a costly decision --- to copy a book that had been condemned for eight hundred years. That book, almost certainly written by a fifth-century Syrian mystic named Stephen bar Sudaili, carried a vision so large and so luminous that no letter of condemnation could quite extinguish it. Stephen believed that everything that exists has emanated from God and will, in the end, return to God --- that the arc of the cosmos bends not toward permanent exclusion but toward homecoming. It cost him the approval of the most respected voices of his tradition. It did not cost him the truth of what he had felt. This episode follows Stephen from the ancient city of Edessa to the dust of Jerusalem, and asks what it means to carry a vision too large for the room you are in.

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