Faith and reason -- Christianity; Immortality -- Christianity; Tragic, The -- Religious aspects -- Christianity
struggle "ever since the type of embryo corresponding with the same
consciousness was represented in the succession of human phenomena." It
is obvious that since Bonnefon begins by denying personal individuality,
he leaves out of account our real longing, which is to save our
individuality; but on the other hand, since he, Bonnefon, is a personal
individual and feels this longing, he has recourse to the distinction
between the called and the chosen, and to the idea of representative
spirits, and he concedes to a certain number of men this representative
individual immortality. Of these elect he says that "they will be
somewhat more necessary to God than we ourselves." And he closes this
splendid dream by supposing that "it is not impossible that we shall
arrive by a series of ascensions at the supreme happiness, and that our
life shall be merged in the perfect Life as a drop of water in the sea.
Then we shall understand," he continues, "that everything was
necessary, that every philosophy and every religion had its hour of
truth, and that in all our wanderings and errors and in the darkest
moments of our history we discerned the light of the distant beacon, and
that we were all predestined to participate in the Eternal Light. And if
the God whom we shall find again possesses a body--and we cannot
conceive a living God without a body--we, together with each of the
myriads of races that the myriads of suns have brought forth, shall be
the conscious cells of his body. If this dream should be fulfilled, an
ocean of love would beat upon our shores and the end of every life would
be to add a drop of water to this ocean's infinity." And what is this
cosmic dream of Bonnefon's but the plastic representation of the Pauline
apocatastasis?
Yes, this dream, which has its origin far back in the dawn of
Christianity, is fundamentally the same as the Pauline anacefaleosis,
the fusion of all men in Man, in the whole of Humanity embodied in a
Person, who is Christ, and the fusion not only of all men but of all
things, and the subsequent subjection of all things to God, in order
that God, Consciousness, may be all in all. And this supposes a
collective redemption and a society beyond the grave.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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