|
Gnosis Volume 1 , English edition Introduction page 25, Madbouly Bookshop, 2005 How can we explain that the intellectual who has made marvellous discoveries and the technocrat, who has exploited them, have left the problem of our end out of the field of our investigations? How can we explain that the enigma raised by the problem of death, leaves that science indifferent and which dares anything and pretends to reach everything? How can we explain that Science, instead of opposing itself to its older sister, Religion, has not come to unite its efforts with hers to resolve the problem of the Being who, in fact, is also that of death? Whether a man dies in bed or aboard an interplanetary ship, the human conditions have not changed in the least. Happiness? But we are taught that happiness lasts only as long as the Illusion lasts...; and what is Illusion? Nobody knows. But it submerges us. If we only knew what Illusion is, we would then know by the opposite what the Truth is. The Truth would liberate us from slavery. Has Illusion, as a psychological phenomenon, ever been submitted to a critical analysis making the most recent facts of Science intervene? It does not seem so, and yet one cannot say that man is lazy and does not search. He is a passionate searcher but he misses the essential and bypasses it while searching. That which strikes us from the very beginning is that man confuses moral progress and technical progress and that the development of Science is going forth in dangerous isolation. The brilliant progress, breaking out of techniques has changed nothing in the essential of human conditions and will change nothing in it because it operates in the domain
of circumstances and touches, but superficially, the inner life of man. But, from the very ancient times, it is known that the essential is found inside man and not outside him. (2) We are generally in agreement in thinking that humanity has arrived at an important turning point in its history. The Cartesian spirit, which has ruined the scholastic philosophy, is now, in its turn, being surpassed. The logic of history reclaims a new spirit. The divorce between traditional knowledge of which Religion is a trustee and acquired knowledge, fruit of Science, risks numbing the Christian civilisation, which promised so much originally. It is an aberration to believe that Science is, by its nature, opposed to Tradition. It must equally be firmly stressed that the Tradition does not include any tendency, which is opposed to Science. On the contrary, the Apostles foresaw the prodigious development of science. Thus the celebrated formula of St. Paul: Faith, Hope and Love resume a vast programme of evolution for human knowledge. If we examine this formula in relation to its context, we see that the first two are temporary while the third is permanent. It was valid, according to the Apostle, for the epoch in which it was expressed and its significance had to evolve with time. That is what happened, in the sense that St. Paul had predicted Science and broadly speaking, Knowledge, destined to substitute both Faith and Hope together, these two limited categories - according to the Apostle and according to the mentality of the epoch in which he was teaching. Both have known since then extraordinary development. He, therefore adds: Now that I have become a man I am putting away what belongs to the child. That is how the passage from Faith to Knowledge is described. St. Paul, thereafter, specifies that the latter, though necessary to evolution, is not a definite state for it cannot have but a partial character. He, further adds, that “when that which is perfect is come, that which is partial shall be done away with". The perfect is Love which englobes in itself the accomplishment of all virtues, of all prophecies, of all mysteries and of all Knowledge. St. Paul insists on this point and concludes by this adjuration: "try to attain love".
| |
