Autor: Walsh, David

Buch: The Third Millenium

Titel: The Third Millenium

Stichwort: Schizophrenie der Welt - Möglichkeit menschlicher Existenz

Kurzinhalt: Our sanity depends on the possibility of recognizing that the schizophrenia of the modern world is not unique or even mistaken

Textausschnitt: 146a Our sanity depends on the possibility of recognizing that the schizophrenia of the modern world is not unique or even mistaken. It accurately mirrors human existence. We are torn between the poles of poverty and fullness, as Plato diagnosed in the Symposium. Our modern split becomes schizophrenic because it forgets the partial nature of its perspective. The part is not the whole, yet it is compelled to act as if it is. Either we become incapable of articulating the transcendent significance of our exertions, or their finite achievements are made to carry a transcendent import. Disorientation is the result as we struggle ever more unsuccessfully to maintain a balance within a context in which the poles of reference seem to have disappeared. This is why the limiting differentiation of the order of being through the advent of Christ is so crucial to the preservation of a life of reason. Transcendent Being is recognized in its unattainability, and immanent reality is stripped of all illusory appearance, yet their integral relationship could not be more fully bodied forth. The building up of civilizational progress could not be placed on a firmer basis than the Christian conviction that action in this world is transparent for the redemptive drama of Being. It is the lost center restoring the wholeness of the modern fragmentation. Whereas the finite exertions desperately sought to touch transcendent consequences, now they are revealed as moments in the flow of the timeless within time. The raw hunger for Being is no longer an impenetrable source of disorientation. It becomes luminous from the balance incarnate in Christ between perfection and imperfection. (Fs)

146b This has always been the appeal of Christianity. It is not the promise of eternal salvation, since that cannot mean anything to us except in terms of the difference it makes in our lives here and now. Fullness of life is not merely a promise projected beyond time; it is apprehended incipiently within existence as well. Christianity is the heart of civilization because it is the fullest realization of life in human experience. Without turning its back on this world, it directs us to live completely within it without losing ourselves in its false infinity. No higher possibility can be conceived than the life that is lived at the highest attunement to Being while remaining within a world of beings. We would never have penetrated to the possibility had not the transcendent Beyond assumed full material presence among us, since all glimpses of the Beyond come only by way of the revelation of its fullness. But now that the opening of Being has occurred, we cannot return to a more compact mode of existence. The whole modern world, with its focus on the rational development of this world, is premised on the differentiation of Christ. (Fs) (notabene)

147a Recognition of the schizophrenic character of its isolation is the prelude to the rediscovery of the source from whence it has come and by which it is still invisibly sustained. Only through the incarnation of transcendent Being can we see the way by which mundane existence can be raised to its highest possibility without the irrational overreaching that would tempt it to futilely surpass God himself. The temptation is removed, not through the restraint of aspiration, but through its fulfillment in the only way possible. We can become God through God becoming man. Christ stands at the center of our world because he is the one who delivers on its promise. He reveals the unattainability of the longing that animates it because he announces its true transcendent fulfillment. Openness toward rational development is vouchsafed by the recognition of the incapacity of a finite world to adequately contain infinite divinity. But at the same time, the measured and manipulated world of finite intelligibility is saved from becoming a homogeneous desert. It remains transparent for the transcendent fullness it can point toward, but not attain, through its own unfolding. (Fs)