The real difficulty with modern technology is not technical but spiritual; what would humankind or nature need to be like, to feel at home in this ‘wild revolution’, as Edgar Morin called it? Left to itself, technical progress becomes the tool of the rich and powerful in their struggle for profit and mastery, while the real need, that hunger for bread and for truth to which we keep referring, is ignored. What we lack, in East and West alike, is any spiritual sense of direction which would make technology our servant rather than the arbiter of our fate. This is hardly the time, therefore, for Christians to forget contemplation and the power that it brings. The more we advance technically, the more we shall need a spiritual revolution, a ‘third revolution’ – corresponding to that of the individual in 1789, and of society in 1917.
As we have seen, it is only because of the biblical revelation that modern technology is possible at all. In Christ, humanity recovers its creative responsibility, the dignity of a co-worker with God. Christ has freed the universe from the corruptions of paganism and sorcery; his very incarnation has abolished the dualism which turned the body into a tomb, the earth into a place of exile. His risen body is not a dematerialized ghost; it is dense with all the flesh of the earth, and all the flesh of the earth is transfigured by it. The Resurrection destroys the world as a tomb and reveals it as Eucharist.
The stupendous fact of the Incarnation, that Christ is both very God and very Man, and that he reveals to us the glorious life of the Trinity, where unity and diversity coexist without abolishing each other, has demanded of the Fathers and the councils a constantly antinomic approach, a way of reasoning by contradictions, which has remained to this day the guiding principle of research. Moreover, biblical revelation has permanently unbalanced the universe by letting loose upon it the dynamism, and the tragedy, of insatiable human liberty, determined on seeking or rejecting the living God. Ever since the call of Abraham and the cross of Jesus, there has been a restlessness in the world, a quest for the absolute, a wound of the infinite; while the world, obscurely, waits for the final catastrophe and the transfiguration of the Kingdom. Modern science and technology have sprung up in this gap, in this boundlessness born of a departure, defying the earth and the stars, for an unknown destination, of a wrestling with the angel, of a God who is not the deus ex machina of our ignorance and our frailty, but who makes us free by dying as a slave on the cross.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
