Though taken further as sheer insight into the power of God rather than as a pretext for further chthonic digression - it is the Panacea of Healing Grace. Surely the most important lesson for us is Bergson’s Openness to Life, for that’s how WE evolve into real, honest-to-goodness Adults.Īnd THAT - by way of illustration - is why Creative Evolution can be, to us conforming believers, at first a misleading proposition. The only way, inferred Bergson, that we can truly LIVE our life is by being open to it.Īnd though Husserl in phenomenology was soon to insist upon putting all judgments in brackets -Īnd Heisenberg in Quantum Physics was to posit his Uncertainty Principle. Over the aging and feeble body of the nineteenth-century European Church? Agnostics of the world, unite? I doubt it - they're just like your antsy neighbours!Īt least Shaw identified the Prime Mover with the Life Force.Īnd wasn’t Nietzsche, who started all this haranguing apotheosis of Life ruling over mediocrity in Thus Spake Zarathustra, just trying to feed his disciples with his atheism. (Though you have to factor in to that equation the anomalous fact that over in Ireland, George Bernard Shaw’s socialism and anticlericalism were nourished and strengthened by it!)Īnd many others, in their enthusiasm, rejected God altogether.Īs Tolstoy might have said, all believers look much the same but all agnostics look vastly different.

There, one encounters the spiritual “distractions” that can so easily derail nascent Faith.Ĭreative Evolution was seen as just such a False Dawn to settled 19-century Christians.īut to young and depressive Jacques and Raissa Maritain, it marked the Dawn of insight that led to their induction into the Church.

The THIRD Stair evokes the infamously treacherous False Dawn one thinks one sees, as a believer, during what a few centuries later would be described by Juan de la Cruz as the Dark Night of the Soul. Eliot penned these pensive lines in the Thirties, he meant by ‘stair’ The Stairway of Perfection, an amazing mystical book written by the great medieval author Walter Hilton. DISTRACTION, MUSIC OF THE FLUTE - STOPS AND STEPS OF THE MIND

Creative evolution by henri bergson