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Vasile Datcu - thinker, writer, Romania

The Gospel according to Plato

Contemporary society has the pride to consider itself to be the most desacralized society in the history, pride built upon the hypothesis that rational thinking – as an instrument of real efficiency in knowledge – can assure solutions for all man’s conflicts, either he versus nature around, or he versus his own nature.

This desacralization did not happen suddenly, as a result of somebody’s or somebody else’s revelation, or the revelation of more individuals at the same time. As far as rational thinking was constantly and increasingly producing arguments that it can take over the quasitotality of the human problems, Divinity was equally losing influence and God was replaced – slowly and progressively – in the being-world relation, either current or profound.

If we take into consideration the fact that, along millenniums, man’s preoccupation for bettering his condition represented a constant, it is natural that contemporary society should have some right in its pride.

Scientific spirit – a direct consequence of the rational thinking – has so much changed the face of the world, through its accent on technology innovation and permanent reformulation in terms of the progress in the human needs, that contemporary man pregnantly lives, at least in his everyday life, in another world as compared to anybody of his forerunners.

The abundance of goods and the vastness of the acquired knowledge have become so overwhelming, that all the paradises through which all great religions used to motivate their believers, offering them a prospect sufficiently attractive for the life beyond, a prospect paid with ascesis, obedience and prayer in the life here, all the paradises have been easily surpassed by the everyday life of an impressive number of believers.

We must have a remark here: although all religions are eminently spiritual constructions, the rewards guaranteed in a possible life-to-be, as a prize for the life lived here in virtue, are substantially material ones (gardens with plenty of fruits, springs with sparkling waters, rivers of milk and honey, serenity, etc.). Thus, if for the believer some centuries ago, the promise of his religion had a significant echo and urged him to a free-consented acceptance of the doctrine, to the common believer of today, surrounded by quite remarkable material plenty, the offers of the religions – by the promised formulae of paradise – seem absolutely embarrassing!

Nowadays the celestial paradise got to be a daily landscape to an overwhelming majority of believers.

Given these circumstances, the death of God, announced by Nietzsche with great intellectual pomp in the second half of the 19^th century – an announcement that was intended to be overhelming by its dimensions and consequences – has got to be almost insignificant today, by the uproar of the bomb-news, of the epoch- making innovations, of the revolutionary technology news.

Owing to the fact that the paradise placed by religion in heaven, has been brought down on earth – and this great achievement is not the work of an Almighty God, but the work of man served by an instrument proved to be infallible, the desacralization of the contemporary man and God’s banishment back into the Holy Scriptures’ texts seem to be not only justifiable but necessarily curative as well, in this way the creative potentialities being not dissipated any more, but totally directed to uninterrupted progress.

So sacredness seems to be restricted in man to the simple dimension of some eroded vestiges, an atrophied and useless organ, an artifact in an evident deadlock of authenticity.

Nevertheless, we know that sacredness is not a stage in the development of conscience, but an element of the structure of conscience (M. Eliade). Consequently, the contemporary world – declared to be atheistic and obviously desacralized – cannot really be either atheistic or desacralized, because, in that way, it could not be at all! So advancing deeper into analysis, we shall notice uncountable signs of a lateral world, full of structures and symbols with religious significance; only that they want to be claimed from other deities than those already established.

By the state of things, contemporary society lives in a kind of religion totally different from the known religious forms, a religious feeling of which society is neither conscious nor willing to linger over the signs that make this feeling visible. This feeling starts with Socrates.

Any religion is based on an eternal immutable truth and also on a way to get to it.

In Christianity truth means the oneness of God, from whom all are claimed and to whom all are reducible. The way to get to this truth is Christian love.

The contemporary man’s truth is Reason based on Word that word endowed with a significance and content of truth equal to all men, those universal definitions of Socrates. The way to get to this truth is rational thinking, based on the dialectics of the contradictory discourse.

There is a fact to be noticed here: Word becomes God with Socrates, almost half a millennium before St. John the Evangelist explicitly formulated this essence.

Man expects any religion to take him away from history – totally or partially – to save him by integrating him into the Great Order of the world, considered immutable by him, the Great Order in which he hopes to be himself again and completed, so refusing a death perceived as implacable and unjust.

Thus he expects to get immortalized at least in a part of his being, by identification with the universal Principle, always placed out of time.

But the contemporary man is the man for whom God is dead! He was replaced by the God of Reason, not as a result of a vision but as a consequence of a promise – a promise sent away for fulfillment to heaven or to another life, but working here on earth and in this life, and this has become possible through the thinking which lies at the origin of the scientific spirit, the creator of all the objects which have provided man with the promised good.

Man is born having a natural tendency to appreciate, then overappreciate and then adore what constantly gives him complete satisfaction of those needs long expected to be fulfilled, fact that brings about an intense sensation of good and also the tendency to demonize all that causes evil to him or maintains him in a state of profound discomfort.

In this way man gets to idolize the world of the objects which have induced him a state of good, so endowing the object with unjustified qualities, turning it into a totem with double virtues: both immediate material ones and also perpetual, spiritual ones. These virtues have no connection with the intrinsic value of the object; they just take it out of the profane universe and place it into a sacred one.

Contemporary man lives in the belief that he has access to the Universal Reason, by the object and through the rational thinking that made it possible.

This type of behavior is a typically religious one. Living in the cult of the object, endowing it with significances which it is not justified to sustain, the man of nowadays gets in fact to practice a type of cosmical religion, a religion practiced by him long before Christianity, a religion regained by rediscovering the sacredness hidden in Life’s details and at Nature’s back.

The bestowing of some sacred valences to the everyday objects proves that within the nowadays’ man there are beliefs gained by social phylogenesis and also the fact that the archaic storage of beliefs is not at all a dark one, where he has sent this heritage with the curative aim of setting himself free from a long ontological confinement, but we speak about an active presence of human values, reactivating themselves any time when favorable conditions appear in the social existence.

But through this behavior leading to profaneness, totally opposed to the sacredness, and its dominance among the goods of everyday life, contemporary man gets into an unpresumable trap: the state of good induced by the comfort of the objects irremediably misappropriates both the road and the contents of the authentic Good.

The industrial object has none of the virtues of the object to which the primitive man prays, or of the relics or the icons to which the believer prays. Having the status of oneness, endowed with exceptional attributes by believing, they have the quality of triggering and amplifying a rich and coherent imaginary world within the believer, a world able to complete him in all his expectations. Being above all religious symbols, the cult objects have always embodied an interface between god and man, by which god, reaching the knowledge of the human restlessness, recommends the road of enveloping in the divine grace. Apart from what the symbol chosen as the support of his worshipping looks like, or what it is, or how it presents itself, the religious man never totally superposes the sacred dimension of the worshipped object over its material dimension, but he keeps for himself, closely served by his religious imagination, an essential attribute of sacrality: transcendence.

On the contrary, the industrial object, not only that it has none of the qualities of the traditional object of cult, but it has a serious shortcoming as well: it is fundamentally perishable.

Socrates did not intend to found a religion, although the presence of some generally valid landmarks beyond the appearance of the world, in his thinking, landmarks he had to make use of in building the rational foundation of knowledge, obviously contained the germs of a religion. Formulating the existence of certain eternal truths, served at the back by an ordering mechanism able to set up the Cosmos within the disorder of the Chaos he implicitly formulated God, in fact, even if his God remains subtextual, on a secondary plan.

Moreover, religions have dealt just temporarily with man’s temporary life: they have particularly dealt with what is everlasting and sacred in this life. Socrates could not deal with the latter type of life, because he firstly had to clarify the former. What man was living in his everyday life seemed to his preoccupation much more dignified than what man would have lived after he would not have lived any more. His approach was a correct and justifiable one.

But he did not know that the human being, unable to be itself when deprived of sacredness, will get to sacralize anything, even the elements less inclined to take over such a representation, on condition that those elements remind an individual of a divine world, through the states they assure, even partly, to that individual.

So that, without intention, Socrates and his thinking, after 24 centuries of germinative latency, get to trigger a kind of religious behaviour in the contemporary man, a behavior in which the Good, aimed as a supreme goal, is substituted by the state of good induced through the use of the object.

Here arrived, today’s man cannot avoid an evident conclusion: identifying himself, for a long time, with the objects around, he will finally take over their features too, so living the feeling of an unexpected anguish: that of understanding that he himself is fundamentally subject to perishability.

The absurdity of his actual condition is clear: living in paradise, he is forced by his new anguish to relive the nostalgia of the paradise.

This type of the absurd is different from that of the existentialist man. That man however lived in the voluptuousness of the daily deed, whereas the contemporary man has exhausted it in the state of good assured by the use of the objects.

Transcending the state of the absurd man – a man prefigured by the existentialist philosophers – nowadays’ man can consider that he has reached an end of history, maybe even the end of history. From here on, there is only one way for him: the road of return. Along this road and not at its end – which maybe does not exist at all – honestly assimilating the retrospection of those more than two millenniums of meditation over his condition, man will regain his stand in the Socratic imperative of “Do know yourself!”, so being able to get to the Christian imperative of “Do love your neighbor!”, as a complete and fulfilled being.