St Basil, the first of the Cappadocian fathers who interpreted the first creation story of the book of genesis, speaks of the first day creating light and then of creating the sun and the moon. The light which God created at first according to Basil is the interior light in us. Basil refers to God in general by employing vocabulary such as “intellectual light” or “the sun of righteousness.” He could refer to the Father as “light without beginning”, or invoke the second Person of the Trinity, as “the Creator Word, the Only begotten God” or the “true light”, who “enlightens” and “shines forth from the Father.” In the same fashion, Basil considers the Holy Spirit to be a “light perceptible to the mind” or “like the sun”.
This is the consciousness with which we measure everything to live with. This consciousness is the critical sense which is evaluating everything we come across. The same consciousness becomes our faith, which is an attitude to life and reality. Faith is the vision of life; it is in this vision that all crisis and conflicts are resolved. Unfortunately, in history, conflicts and confrontations were resolved in the Hegelian way of dialectics. This dialectics spills over to social life as war in Hegel’s thought. Hegel was a war monger. He conceived progress as way of war, dialectic of politics. Marx borrowed the same dialectics in the field of labour and wages. For him the social dialectics of class war became revolution of the proletariat against the capitalist. But every time it was dictatorship of the proletariat subjugating the other side.
The Second World War, Nazism and Stalinism marked the death of God and death of man in utter meaningless existentialism and objective science with no future for man. We were in a valueless world of neutral reality with hopeless future. We had to look for a way of life without endless wars of racial domination or egoist subjugation of individuals or corporations. We have to look for peaceful coexistence and cooperation.
Arnold Toynbee and Jacques Maritain called Marxism “Modern Manichaeism”, which considers life as endless war against evils. Today Catholic Church realises with deep contrition the war against heretics and the possessed during the Inquisition. Manichaean heresy infiltrated the church as well. Church as social body also will have to live with conflicts and controversies; but how have we to understand and resolve them? There is the perennial temptation to succumb to the Hegelian dialectical path. The present crisis in the Syro-Malabar Church looks like an example of having lost the light of which St Basil talks of. The present crisis calls for an evaluation of the church’s maturity and spiritual health in solving its internal difficulties. Romano Guardini is an example of getting out the Hegelian dialectics. Bergolio, the present Pope, is understood to have studied him. Nicholai Berdyaev is one of those who participated in the October revolution of Russia and got frustrated with Marxism and became a theologian of the Orthodox Church in Russia. “My acceptance of Christian faith was not altogether orthodox and not at first churchly,” Wrote Nicholai Berdyaev. He is not ready to be defender of the institutional interests of the church but one who believe in the existence of a universal mysticism and of a universal spirituality. For him the social problem is… a matter of ethics rather than of economics and politics.”
Dialectical issues are not to be reduced to the binary of good and evil, because they may be different shades and forms of the good. Evil as Augustine has very well defined is absence or privation. All differences may not be at all evil as such but only differences that could not coexist. We are very often confronted by variety and plurality of the other. It is question of how one understands the apparent contrarieties in consciousness. We are not in the realm of politics or economics, but of ethics, the critical sense of the consciousness. Berdyaev writes, “All the forces of my spirit and of my mental and moral consciousness are bent towards the inward understanding of the problems which press so hard upon me. But my object is not so much to give them a systematic answer, as to put them more forcibly before the Christian conscience.”… “Divine dignity is inherent in man”, “man as a creator of values is put by Berdyaev in the place of God.” “The divine Logos triumphs over the meaninglessness of the objective world. Truth is the triumph of Spirit. Integral truth is God.” Berdyaev work is what he calls “free prophetic philosophy,” with all the partial and incomplete utterances of a prophet.”