Cosmos and Transcendence Quotes

“Having been created 'thoughtful and wise in the image of God; as Gregory of Sinai points out, man enjoys nonetheless the option of making himself 'bestial, senseless and almost insane: Now a better description of the Freudian id could scarcely be conceived. One may suppose, moreover, that to men of spiritual discernment the existence of such a 'nether realm' in us will come as no surprise. Freud's main contribution, therefore, lies in the fact that he has elevated this particular element of our psychic make-up to the status of a first principle: he has made it 'the core of our being'. What appears on the traditional maps as the lowest fringe of psychic existence—a mere shadow of that supra-physical light which resides within us as an image of God—has become in Freud's eyes our very soul. On closer inspection the Freudian doctrine turns out to be an inversion of the Christian truth.”
― Wolfgang Smith, Cosmos and Transcendence: Breaking Through the Barrier of Scientistic Belief

“… he is coming visibly under the influence of another idea, which was somehow gaining a hold upon the European mind: the idea of mechanism. As historians of science have pointed out, this conception was already beginning to express itself during the fourteenth century in the form of a remarkable craze for the construction of gigantic astronomical clocks. ‘No European community felt able to hold up its head unless in its midst the plants wheeled in cycles and epicycles, while angels trumpeted, cocks crew, and apostles, kings and prophets marched and counter-marched at the booming of the hours… by the seventeenth century the concept of a ‘clockwork universe’ had become very much a part of the European intellectual scene, and was exercising a considerable scientific influence.
[22]”
― Wolfgang Smith, Cosmos and Transcendence: Breaking Through the Barrier of Scientistic Belief

“...Burtt’s treatise:
Wherever was taught as truth the universal formula of gravitation, there was also insinuated as a nimbus of surrounding belief that man is but the puny and local spectator, nay irrelevant product of an infinite self-moving engine, which existed eternally before him and will be eternally after him, enshrining the rigor of mathematical relationships while banishing into impotence all ideal imaginations; an engine which consists of raw masses wandering to no purpose in an undiscoverable time and space, and is in general wholly devoid of any qualities that might spell satisfaction for the major interests of human nature, save solely the central aim of the mathematical physicist.
[10-11]”
― Wolfgang Smith, Cosmos and Transcendence: Breaking Through the Barrier of Scientistic Belief

“Meanwhile all the ideal aspects of human culture, including all
values and norms, have become relegated to the subjective sphere,
and truth itself has become in effect subsumed under the category
of utility. Transcendence and symbolism out of the way, there
remains only the useful and the useless, the pleasurable and the disagreeable. There are no more absolutes and no more certainties;
only a positivistic knowledge and feelings, a veritable glut of feelings. All that pertains to the higher side of life-to art, to morality
or to religion-is now held to be subjective, relative, contingent-in
a word, 'psychological'. One is no longer capable of understanding
that values and norms could have a basis in truth.”
― Wolfgang Smith, Cosmos and Transcendence: Breaking Through the Barrier of Scientistic Belief

“The knowledge, therefore, that is symbolized
by the forbidden fruit is a partial and fragmentary knowledge, a
knowledge which fails to grasp the absolute dependence of all
things upon their Creator. It is a reduced knowledge which perceives the world not as a theophany but as a sequence of contingencies: not sub specie aeternitatis but under the aspect of temporality.
And it is only in this fragmented world wherein all things are in a
state of perpetual flux that evil and death enter upon the scene.
They enter thus, on the one hand, as the inescapable concomitant
of a fragmentary knowledge, a knowledge of things as divorced
from God; and at the same time they enter as the dire consequences
of'disobedience' -the misuse of man's God-given freedom-and so
as 'the wages of sin'.”
― Wolfgang Smith, Cosmos and Transcendence: Breaking Through the Barrier of Scientistic Belief