It
strikes a powerful blow at the scholastic notion of a dichotomized
universe divided between nature and supernature, divine and human.
It reinforced humanism by minimizing, if not making unnecessary,
the objective and external source and external interpretations of
religions. It pushes back the initial creative _act_ until it is lost
in the mists and chaos of an unimaginably remote past. Meanwhile,
creative _energy_, the very essence of transcendent life, is, as we
know it, not transcendent at all, but working outward from within,
a part of the process, not above and beyond it. The inevitable
implication here is that God is sufficiently, if not exclusively,
known through natural and human media. Science recognizes Him in the
terms of its own categories as in and of His world, a part of all its
ongoings and developments. But His creative life is indistinguishable
from, if not identical with, its expressions. Here, then, is a
practical obliteration of the line once so sharply drawn between the
natural and the supernatural. Hence the demarcation between the divine
and human into mutually exclusive states has disappeared.
This would seem, then, to wipe out also any knowledge of absolute
values. Christian theism has interpreted God largely in static, final
terms. The craving for the absolute in the human mind, as witnessed by
the long course of the history of thought, as pathetically witnessed
to in the mixture of chicanery, fanaticism and insight of the modern
mystical and occult healing sects, is central and immeasurable.
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