Why
so long a gestation?
Seemingly,
for a long time, this union is likely to be sterile if not harmful.
What was not said about the 'darkness of the Middle Ages'! Why this
relative 'slowness', even this apparent 'regression' of the
historical process? There can be only a major reason. The hugeness of
the difference thus met cannot not be without deep trauma. The
Occident does not leave easily neither quickly its traumatism of
birth.
A
long time
of gestation.
In
any alive process, the cycles of gestation or of maturation are long
cycles. Here the time has to be measured by the hugeness of the
embracing differences. Such sowing could only bear fruit after a very
long winter.
Eternity
puts temporality into perspective.
When eternity opens, time has to get patient. The investments are
done at very long run. One sows for a harvest which transcends the
solar rhythms. An astonishing patience! Still in the Middle Ages, the
decades or even the centuries necessary for the construction of a
cathedral are far from paralyzing the projects. And yet didn't they
have an life expectancy definitely shorter than
ours?
Deconstruction.
The Judeo-Christian revolution disaggregates the massive greco-Roman
coherence. Between this destruction and the new organization, it will
take centuries of deep re-significance of a new world. Remember
Gregory the Great, about 600 AD; and
two centuries later, a first 'Renaisance' with Charlemagne… Any
deconstruction leaves a crumbling and a scattering of structural
elements from which the construction of a new structure is not
immediate, and as much less than the destroyed structure is more
enormous. Now the Judeo-Christian impact,
braking up basically any structural enclosure because its essential
project is not horizontal construction but vertical opening, can only
disaggregate the massive pagan coherence, in fact the greco-Roman
one. Between this deconstruction and a new reorganization, it will
take centuries of readjustments.
A
world without slaves. The ancient
culture thus deconstructed was elitist. The city lived to the
detriment of immense surrounding spaces and nine tenth of the
inhabitants were slaves thus producing at low costs a huge amount of
wealth for a minority of citizens. The Judeo-Christian revolution
proclaims that there is no more
neither slave nor free man but only sons and daughters of the same
Father. Such a 'democracy' and the training for it can only be,
during long centuries, a factor of deep dysfunction. Slavery, i.e.
the mode of production where the producer-slave, far from consuming,
releases an big availability of consumption, constitutes the driving
tool system of the ancient power. However this kind of tool system is
in principle denied by the Judeo-Christian innovation.
Necessary consequence of the suppression of slavery, it is thus the
free man who must convert himself into a worker. Such a training of
released freedom is necessarily a slow process.
Clearing.
The culture starts with agriculture. And agriculture with grubbing.
What would agriculture be without the long preliminary work of the
land-clearing monks?
What
is 'progress'? The concept of
'progress' which was so often used as a war-horse against the
Judeo-Christian relevance
is itself, like a lot of other
dynamic concepts, a late fruit of history starting from the original
fertilization from
the two antithetic contributions. Its roots are more in the Sinai
than in Athens. This concept, primarily a relative one, became an
absolute one only for lack of an Absolute and for its substitution.
Because the Judeo-Christian innovation refuses to lock up man in the
vicious circle of production buckled on consumption, the concept of
'progress' is meant to be beyond the simple exponential cumulative
increase of having and power. But spiritual progress is infinitely
harder to promote and slower to accomplish than the other
one.
Complication.
The confrontation between the pagan component and the Judeo-Christian
exponent did not play pure. It became unrestainedly complicated and
complexed. Are you sure to measure enough, for example, the
disturbance which represents the permanent threat and the successive
invasion of the 'barbarians'? And the long time necessary between the
confrontations and the integrations. And what about the confrontation
with Islam? These fierce spiritual 'cousins' will constitute a major
challenge. Here, however, the difference does not play any more in
rough state and the cultural centres are not basically heterogeneous.
But Islam is tied entirely in idiosyncrasy and is thus likely to
unceasingly run up against the other one in total confrontation.
The
'values' brought by the Judeo-Christian revolution are initially
values of a 'no', anti-values.
They are likely to leave the pagan world with very long indigestion.
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