The most authentically Christian, baptismal attitude, must be one of exorcism.
In exorcizing the determinisms of technological society we are by no means condemning the scientific research and invention which spring from it. Rather, we are trying to make them have more respect for reality. Christians must demand of science a more open-ended research, and of technology an efficiency that serves the irreducible person no less than the indispensable relationship between Man and the universe; earth, if no longer our mother, must be our lover.
The possibilities of human intelligence, where God’s image is particularly concentrated, have no end, in both senses of the word: they are boundless, and there is no final point at which the image will cease to be aware of itself as an image. Engaging in scientific research, and in dialogue with scientists, Christians must testify that the human person on the one hand, and created beings on the other, are strictly inexhaustible. If the inexhaustibleness remains a secret, the scientific quest will be endless. If the inexhaustibleness is recognized, the quest might be brought to completion. Christians are faced by a science enclosed in its own mythology; they must summon it to become an open science, whose questioning they can refine.
Exorcism cannot be separated from an inner struggle for transfiguration. This struggle is not at all a matter for scientific speculation, a philosophical theory for the consideration of the learned; it is a work of faith, which the learned can undertake, if they wish, in their inmost hearts.
In us, indeed through us, the liturgical cosmos draws near to the fallen world which we study, which is there for our use; in us and through us, the light of the Transfiguration is diffused from the atom to the nebula, the ‘contemplation of nature’ is extended through physical and biological research, Christ’s reintegrating power turns back the forces of chaos. The problem of technical civilization is increasingly ‘one of meaning and purpose, and meaning and purpose can come only through spiritual people. Only the people of the Eucharist can bring about the integration of matter. Only the people of the icon can rescue the threatened image of the person. Only people who turn the universe into a church whose altar is their own heart can remind science and technology of the sanctity of the earth, and its entitlement to humility and respect.
Here we must return to Fedorov (the ‘strange librarian’ of 19th century Moscow, who would happily slip into the reader’s hand, not only the book he had asked for, but any other book Fedorov thought he needed …).
He suggests that the real problem is not ‘the social problem in the sense of the problem of riches and of poverty, and of universal plenty’, but that ‘of life and death and of the universal return to life’. So Christians are to celebrate Easter ‘in their daily, earthly work’. ‘The liturgy must encompass the whole of life, not only the inner life of the spirit, but the exterior, worldly life, transforming it into a work of resurrection.’
Fedorov criticized the attitude of modern technology towards nature as only seeming to be positive, while actually it is the abandonment to instinct. We seek to plunder nature for immediate gratification and remain its slaves. We are controlled by technology, whereas we ought to control it as a means to a paschal end. A truly positive relationship with the cosmos must be one of life-giving communion.
Today ecological and environmental problems force themselves on our attention. In our lifetime the earth has been raped; technological humanity must enter into a living relationship with it.
According to Fedorov, spiritual discipline should be for everyone, governing our ‘common work’ of scientific and technical advancement.
He also recommends the blowing up of towns, not as centres of culture but as cancerous growths. People must recover, after a period of estrangement, a sense of the sanctity of the earth and, by way of that, the love of ancestors for whom the earth is the body and who sleep in it like seeds of resurrection. Progress which is not aimed at the resurrection of all would be merely a succession of murders. Indeed, today we see the crowds in our cities awkwardly seeking any opportunity of contact with the earth and with the great works of the past; we see communities of young people rejecting, as Fedorov wished them to, the endless greed of commercial civilization; they do not reject technology, however, but subject it to the requirements of a true encounter with beings and things. Technology itself, in its most modern forms, makes it possible to blow up towns and sometimes causes it to happen. The automated factory is already setting free human energy, which for the time being we would rather leave to rot in unemployment while the third world suffers poverty. We are waiting for the prophetic will that can direct it towards life-giving forms of work. .
In his conclusion Fedorov insists that only a religion of universal resurrection can bring together in one great sacrament of life the sealed-off compartments of culture. ‘In the effort to recreate the world in the incorruptible beauty which it had before the Fall, a reunited science and art will become one universal ethic, aesthetic, and technology for the regeneration of the cosmos
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
