If we want lasting succes in our endeavors, we need to learn to work with those who will be alive 100 years from now, and, if possible, work with those who have been gone 100 years.
We’ve done a good job conquering space (planes, trains, automobiles, Skype), but now we have to learn to conquer time.
“What happens in history, [Rosenzweig] says, is not a struggle between man’s faith and man’s reason but a struggle between God and man. In world history the absolute powers themselves are dramatis personae [the characters of the play]. Revelation breaks into the world and transforms creation, which is the Alpha of history, into redemption, which is the Omega. Philosophy has a pagan quality. It is an expression of the Alpha, of creation, of pure nature to which God has given freedom — even against himself. But as revelation comes into the world, it gradually absorbs philosophy, deprives it of its pagan elements, and illuminates it with its own light. The Omega of history will be realized after the element of creation, the world’s freedom, has spent itself. Then God, who has allowed the world to be in the Alpha, will again be the First and the Last, the Alpha and the Omega.”
~Alexander Altmann, from Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy: An Introduction to Their “Letters on Judaism & Christianity”, from Judaism Despite Christianity, University of Chicago Press, 1935, page 33.
I read this on a Facebook page called Strange Art. I thought it was good so I’ll share it here…
Man is the most elevated of creatures, Woman the most sublime of ideals.
God made for man a throne; for woman an altar.
The throne exalts, the altar sanctifies.
Man is the brain, Woman, the heart.
The brain creates light, the heart, Love. Light engenders, Love resurrects.
Because of reason Man is strong, because of tears Woman is invincible.
Reason is convincing, tears moving.
Man is capable of all heroism, Woman of all martyrdom.
Heroism ennobles, martyrdom sublimates.
Man has supremacy, Woman, preference.
Supremacy is strength, preference is the right.
Man is a genius, Woman, an angel.
Genius is immeasurable, the angel undefinable.
The aspiration of man is supreme glory,
The aspiration of woman is extreme virtue.
Glory creates all that is great; virtue, all that is divine.
Man is a code, Woman a gospel.
A code corrects, the gospel perfects.
Man thinks, Woman dreams.
To think is to have a worm in the brain,
to dream is to have a halo on the brow.
Man is an ocean, Woman a lake.
The ocean has the adorning pearl, the lake, dazzling poetry.
Man is the flying eagle, Woman, the singing nightingale.
To fly is to conquer space. To sing is to conquer the Soul.
Man is a temple, Woman a shrine.
Before the temple we discover ourselves, before the shrine we kneel.
In short, man is found where earth finishes, woman where heaven begins.
***
“A wounded heart does not recover in the spiritual world without a change in the visible world. Resurrection never does enthrone the spirit in the same place where it left one body, as though nothing had happened. Something has happened; death has intervened. When I experienced an infinitesimal fraction of resurrection, I learned to my amazement how severe the law was which made it impossible for me to continue among the same people in the same place.”
~from The Christian Future, page 145
“[S]cience has replaced magic and superstition in our era only by inheriting from Christianity its faith in progress† and its power to fight against the vicious circle of mental habits for an open future, the power to change our minds through suffering…
“Scholars have been complacently sawing off the trunk of Revelation on which their science was but a branch. By refusing to acknowledge their indebtedness to the Christian era for one future, one time common to all men, they lose orientation. Sciences do not give orientation; they presuppose it. The pillars of time are erected by lived lives, not by theories.”
~from The Christian Future, page 84 & 86.
† “Outside of science, progress is simply a myth… Without [progress], will we not despair? Like trembling Victorians terrified of losing their faith … humanists cling to the moth-eaten brocade of progressive hope. Today religious believers are more free-thinking. Driven to the margins of a culture in which science claims authority over all of human knowledge, they have had to cultivate a capacity for doubt. In contrast, secular believers – held fast by the conventional wisdom of the time – are in the grip of unexamined dogmas.”
~John Gray, from Straw Dogs, Forward
“Without the scientist’s feeling that truth is of the utmost concern, truth ceases to be of concern, in the mores of the people…
“Progress is impossible in a society which has lost orientation.”
~TCF, page 89.
Pursuit of Percipience 