The machine is opposed to man, consequently it is also opposed to God; in a world where it poses as norm, it abolishes both the human and the divine. The logical solution to the problem would be the return to the crafts and at the same time to religion.

What the people need in order to find a meaning in life, hence a possibility of earthly happiness, is religion and the crafts: religion because every man has need of it, and the crafts because they allow man to manifest his personality and to realize his vocation in the framework of a sapiential symbolism; every man loves intelligible work and work well done.

 

Now industrialism has robbed the people of both things: on the one hand of religion, denied by scientism from which industry derives, and rendered unlikely by the inhuman character of the mechanistic ambience, and on the other hand the crafts, replaced precisely by machinism; so much so that in spite of all the "social doctrines" of the Church and the nationalistic bourgeoisie, there is nothing left for the people which can give a meaning to their life and make them happy.

 

The classic contradiction of traditional Catholicism is to want to maintain the social hierarchy, in which it is theoretically right, even while accepting whole-heartedly- as an acquisition of the "Christian civilization" which in fact has long been abolished- the scientism and the machinism which precisely compromise this hierarchy by cutting the people off, in fact, from humankind.

 

The inverse error is founded on the same cult of technology,

with the difference that it is detrimental to the bourgeoisie rather than to the common people and that it aims at reducing the entire society to mechanistic inhumanity while on the other hand presenting it with an "opium" made of bitterness and frigidity which kills the very organ of happiness; for to be happy it is necessary to be a child, happiness being made of gratitude and confidence, humanly speaking.

 

The machine is opposed to man, consequently it is also

opposed to God; in a world where it poses as norm, it abolishes both the human and the divine. The logical solution to the problem would be the return -which in fact has become impossible without a divine intervention -to the crafts and at the same time to religion- and thereby to an ambience which, by not falsifying our sense of the real, does not make unlikely what is evident.

 

One of the greatest successes of the devil was to create around man surroundings in which God and immortality appear unbelievable. (And this certainly is not, in spite of all illusions, "Christian civilization".)

 

(It will undoubtedly be objected that the Church could not compromise itself by opposing that "irreversible" phenomenon which is industrialism; we would reply first of all that the truth has precedence over any consideration of opportuneness or of "irreversibility", and then that the Church could always have affirmed its doctrinal position, to all intents and purposes, without having to be unrealistic on the level of facts; it could moreover have opted, with perfect logic and in accord with its entire past, for the monarchist and traditional right-wing which upheld it by definition, without having to compromise itself in the eyes of some, with the ambiguous "right" born in the XIXth century in the shadow of the machine.)

 

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From the Divine to the Human by Frithjof Schuon

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