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This dynamics of 'progress', this is to say the refusal to settle down and the going ahead towards the conquest of a promised land, where do you find it if not in the Bible? You have to go back to the extraordinary adventure of the Occident born from the interfertility of extreme difference.

Progress implies a double possibility, namely a dynamics of going beyond and an articulatory rationality. Both come from this double heredity without which the Occident is unthinkable. The maternal components bring scientific and technological rationality. The Judeo-Christian exponents equip it with the dynamics of transcendence.

During centuries the Judaeo-Christian disproportion remains contained. Because it is primarily from a vertical order. It plays in Covenant. Its prowness is mystical. Its audacities culminate in the spires of the cathedrals. On the scene of the world it remains in its way 'measurement', but in a way radically different from Greek 'measurement'. This one is a necessary bond with the rationality of the totality. That one is alliance with an Infinite Person.

The measurement of pagan measurement is the cosmic reason. The measurement of Judaeo-Christian measurement is the disproportion of an infinite freedom. Excessiveness, on one side, can be only promethean and necessarily likely to fail. Judaeo-Christian excessiveness, in the contrary, is channeled vertically. It acts with Agape. For the Greeks, that man is the measurement of all things can only be true, under penalty of falling into scepticism, insofar man is identified with the reason. In Judaeo-Christian space, that man is the measurement of all things is true insofar as man remains faithful to his image and his resemblance of God. The defence of man necessarily passes there by the defence of God. The possibilities of man are infinite not in autonomy but in the relationship to the infinite Source of the Sense. In Alliance.

The Judaeo-Christian explosiveness does not remain indefinitely contained. The son of the Greek mother claims for himself the paternal heritage. Man revealed divine by grace wants to become god without the Father. The divine man become manifest through the Judaeo-Christian experience wants to continue this experience without God. The Judaeo-Christian disproportion, until there in its vertical order, breaks this order of the Covenant and, strong with the dynamics coming from the Other, resumes itself in autonomy and explodes horizontally. Then starts the adventure of the great schizoid enclosure which buckles the divine possible of man on itself and deploys it, anthropocentric, in its immense cave of Utopia. The son of the pagan mother assumes for himself the paternal heritage. Man revealed divine through the Judaeo-Christian experience wants to become god without the Father.

All occurs as if the Neolithic “mechanisms” started to function exponentially. The tool producing the tool which exceeds it, a mass of utility inflates and overflows. The invention causes the increasingly bold invention. Increasingly enormous are followed the technological waves. The revolution mechanist devotes the first triumphs of the exact science and rigorous: Galileo, Mersenne, Gassendi, Descartes… From now on the human spirit has its “tool” to be able all to calculate and, therefore, all to manufacture.

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