We must not forget that from its beginning Christianity came into contact with a whole range of prehistoric systems of thought, whose influence penetrated the Mediterranean world after Alexander’s expedition, when Greek and Asian civilizations met; sciences of inner reality and underlying causes, animist or pan-psychic beliefs about existence, in which humanity and the cosmos are at one. Indian yoga and Chinese medicine, which even threaten to undermine Marxist historical materialism, are modern examples of this type of thought.
For its part, Christianity, in the face of monistic and occult beliefs, has firmly upheld the freedom and the transcendence of the person. The ascetic achievement of the great monks was to rid the earth finally of the putrescent corpse of Pan and, having thus exorcized it, to return it to the keeping of humankind.
Even so, the wisdom of the past was not entirely discarded. Taking care to avoid black magic and any tendency to pantheism, and to reserve the freedom that belongs to God and human beings— for the scholastics said of astrology, ‘the stars influence, they do not determine’ – Christianity made some use of this inheritance, and even transfigured it.
Among other examples we might cite the influence of astrology and alchemy in Byzantium and in the West, or the Pythagorean theories of numbers and musical intervals, which were so important for the builders of churches. Thus was Christianity able to clothe human endeavours with a symbolism which could link people with the divine intelligence through the structures of the cosmos.
It was then that the old Christian lands acquired their familiar appearance. Whereas in new countries nature is either virgin or violated, and human work in India and the traditional Far East is directed towards absorption in the cosmos, nature in the old Christian countries shows the marks of grace, almost as if it had a face, and sometimes becomes the ‘image of the image’, that is to say, of Man the image of God.
It is only because of the energy which pre-modern Christianity, incorporating ancient universal wisdom, was able to store up, that the discoveries and inventions of the modern West have been possible.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
