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A sane person, however, would want to know about the fact, to know what it is, and only then could also think it.
This is backwards of course. Reality does not give up its secrets easily and there is great need of honest inquiring thought to approach them.
This is so true that uncertainty in relationships is one of the most terrible afflictions of our generation. It is difficult to become certain about relationships, even within a family. We live as if we were seasick, with such insecurity in the web of our relations that we no longer build up what is human.
A method is a locus of adequate motives.
truth is the correspondence between reality and awareness.
A writer of the Samizdat, that is, underground Soviet literature, says: “We well know that the lie of all revolutions is in the fact that they are strong and concrete in condemning and in destroying, but are absolutely weak and abstract in building and creating.”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, which he expresses in a fascinating way when he speaks of the Russians as a people whose memory has been amputated.
“Whole speechless generations are born and die off who do not tell each other about themselves,” because they are prevented from remembering, says the Russian writer.3 His words strike like a sword at the roots of today’s mortal infirmity.
In this way, we burn our bridges with tradition or history, and render sterile our impetus towards the future (though this impetus can remain as anger, an anger directed at nothing, as we read in the Divine Comedy: “Phlegyas, Phlegyas, … thou criest in vain”4).
The intellect of the damned becomes void when the portal of the future is swung to.
Old age at twenty and even sooner – at fifteen – this is a distinguishing feature of today’s world.
Another idol of the theatre is our overwillingness to agree with the arguments of science.
Rising with their aid (since it is determined to do this by its own nature) to ever higher, ever more remote, conditions, it soon becomes aware that in this way – the questions never ceasing – its work must always remain incomplete; and it therefore finds itself compelled to resort to principles which overstep all possible empirical employment … they are no longer subject to any empirical test.9
And yet...
But the fact that reason feels itself “compelled” to seek out other principles is a “constraint” implied in experience, a factor of experience itself. To deny this step is to go against experience. It is to disown something implied in it.
The most ferocious persecution is the modern state’s attempt to block the expression of the communital dimension of the religious phenomenon. As far as the state is concerned, you can, in conscience, believe what you like, as long as this faith does not imply that all believers are one, and therefore, have the right to live and express this reality. To obstruct communal expression is like cutting off the roots that nourish the plant: the plant soon dies.
