Exponents

The providential encounter between our pagan mother and our Judeo-Christian father provoked an inter-fertilization between the maternal components and the paternal exponents.

These polarities or polar-concepts which signify while being opposed are not labels covering fixed and definite contents. They are rather open concepts which aim beyond towards an 'essence' which is gradually specified. To bring out the essence behind the concept 'adventurers of eschatology', for instance, a whole of phenomena, dimensions, projects, prototypes, and so on, a whole family of concepts, are called reciprocally to converge towards this 'essence'. The same applies to the concept of 'builder of the ideal city'. The essence of each antithetic family is thus released while gaining at the same time 'comprehension' and 'extension'.

This differential typology can, to stimulate the thought, make the provisional saving of analysis and of distinctions it would deserve. It is not descriptive but provocative. Its simplification forces the features giving rise to thinking on the side of the mental dynamics with their symbols and their conscious-unconscious dimensions.

Components are quasi natural to humans. Exponents extend beyond. They introduce a kind of explosive charge in the middle of the components to provoke them beyond.

Thus, for example, the rational cosmos of the Greeks will not be able to become scientifically articulable until it looses the sacred aura of its divine nature to be a simple product of creation, as the Judeo-Christian reason affirms it with force. The cosmos created by God, createdprimarily different of God, created contingent, and thus becoming at the same time world of man, delivered to the free enterprise of man who can from now on explore the universe systematically and whose field of possibility, science and technology, opens ad infinitum.

Science and technology will be able to really become progress only when time, without refusing rationality, is not a closed circle but, according to the Judeo-Christian innovation, an indefinitely open line in front of itself, and therefore decisive time of history. A new time for the audacity of man who, far from being a prisoner of the necessary order, is from now on able to found his own order and to dream to become, as Descartes will say, master and owner ofnature.

Man, this 'microcosm' related to the necessity of the cosmos and the city, will be revealed more deeply a child of God and thus invested of a radical and inalienable freedom. He will be discovered 'person'. The modern man is incomprehensible without this dialectical tension of rational necessity and creative freedom, of logical proportion and foolish disproportion, of continuity and rupture, of immanent insistence and transcendent requirement. Only such a man can open even the impossible one.

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